Inconsistent Environment on Linux

Describe the bug The runner’s environment is populated with the contents of the .env file but ignores the operating system’s standard /etc/environment file. This leads to the situation that commands – depending on how they are invoked – see a different environment. This is most apparent with sudo.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. echo 'ENV_TEST=true' >>/etc/environment while building the runner
2. Run env; sudo env within an action executed with the runner that has the /etc/environment line
3. Notice that ENV_TEST is only available in sudo’s env

🔥 It is possible that this is an issue with https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-controller and not this project, I am here to find this out. 😉

Expected behavior I would expect that every command’s environment is prepopulated with the values from /etc/environment since that is the operating system’s standard. I guess it could also make sense to argue in another direction, but then no program should ever see the values from /etc/environment; this is definitely going to be significantly harder to achieve than sourcing /etc/environment before .env in LoadAndSetEnv so that .env overwrites anything in /etc/environment.

Note that the separation between /etc/environment and .env would also allow setting environment variables for all users and the runner user separately.

Runner Version and Platform

All Linux versions are affected, and I am specifically coming from https://github.com/actions-runner-controller/actions-runner-controller/issues/1135.

[Fleshgrinder]

I test my idea from above and it works as expected. I am not yet entirely sure if it should be exec env -- or exec env -i -- but that is something for ARC. Thanks again everyone, and I might come back to your offer @ethomson. 😉

[ruvceskistefan]

Hi @Fleshgrinder, Thanks for filing this issue! We are investigating the bug you described, so we will get back to you as soon as we have more informations.