How to change Pkg.dir and homedir in Julia permanently?

[James Chen]

Hi,

I am trying to change Pkg.dir and homedir for Julia permanently, as the default installation set them to a net-drive in my Win7. I can use ENV[""] = to set them temporarily. However, every time I exit Julia and restart it, the Pkg.dir and homedir change back to the default net-drive directory, which is really an issue to me. 

Can anyone help me? Many thanks. 

[paul.so...@gmail.com]

Hi, here are some things that I found out (by trial and error) and then documented on my homepage (https://sites.google.com/site/paulsoderlindecon/home/software). With some luck, it helps.

If your PC is in a university (or corporate) network, chances are that your system administrators have set some windows environment variables in a way that creates problems with installing Julia packages (for instance, by setting HOMEDRIVE to a network drive). If you encounter such problems, set the environment variable HOME to C:\Users\yourusername (you find/add it at control panel-system-advanced system settings-environment variables-user variables). In case that does not work, try this instead: create  a bat file (say, Julia.bat) containing three lines (1) set HOMEDRIVE=C: (2) set HOMEPATH=\Users\yourusername (3) D:\Julia\bin\julia.exe (or wherever it is located). Then run this bat file to use Julia. In either case, you may have to execute Pkg.init() before starting do install packages.

 

[Tony Kelman]

You could also put these settings in a juliarc.jl startup file.

[Greg Plowman]

See also environment variable JULIA_PKGDIR

http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/stdlib/pkg/#Base.Pkg.dir

[James Chen]

The ENV variable works for me. 

Thank you very much, Paul!  Have a nice day.

[James Chen]

Thanks for you reply, that is what I do. 

However I have to put this juliarc.jl in the net-drive, and moreover, the precompile process of a new adding package still locates in the net-drive, which is not favorable, too. As the crucial point to me is that I only have limited space of the net-drive (....4MB.....)

[James Chen]

Thanks. 

I think Paul gives a more robust solution. It seems that Julia_home_variable (if any) is exactly the HOME environment variable for windows, in default setting.