As I’m sure many people who were using Deadline 7 have done, I installed Deadline 8 alongside 7 to ensure a smooth transition. But when I started uninstalling 7 a lot of my Deadline related tools stopped working. I discovered that when I uninstalled Deadline 7 the DEADLINE_PATH environment variable was removed…even though it was set for Deadline 8. I realize that nothing can really be done for this now, but for future releases this should be taken into consideration since it creates a lot of unnecessary work for people who are managing large render farms.
Mmm, yeah, we definitely should be checking to make sure the DEADLINE_PATH is pointing to the version you’re currently un-installing before removing it. I honestly thought we were already doing that, which version of 7 did you have installed?
If it’s not already done, it should be a pretty simple matter to address though, thanks for reporting this!
Cheers,
Jon
Thanks Jon,
We were on Deadline Version: 7.2.1.10 R (b8ff445b3)
Kind of curious. Is there an easy way to script setting environment variables using Python or maybe a batch script?
On Windows? I found this bit on MSDN:
The broadcast might be tricky to do from Python, might be easier in Power Shell but I’m definitely no power shell guru 
. We’re lucky in that our installer package takes care of the nitty-gritty for us.
Linux should be pretty easy, we just create a shell script in /etc/profile.d to set the environment on login:
jon@jon-ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/profile.d/deadlineclient.sh
#!/bin/sh
DEADLINEBIN=/opt/Thinkbox/Deadline8/bin
export DEADLINE_PATH=$DEADLINEBINShould just be a matter of re-creating that file.
On OS X, we don’t use an environment variable at all (mostly because they don’t have a good consistent way of setting them across the board). It’s just a file in the Shared users folder that we store the path in:
Boson:~ jgaudet$ cat /Users/Shared/Thinkbox/DEADLINE_PATH
/Applications/Thinkbox/Deadline8/ResourcesAgain, should just be a matter of re-creating that specific file.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Jon
Thanks Jon, that should help. I think I found a way to do it with a batch file but it’s not working yet. But my IT guy assures me it should work.
It was simpler than I thought. You can run this line of code in either a .bat file or straight in a command prompt on Windows.
setx DEADLINE_PATH "C:\Program Files\Thinkbox\Deadline8\bin" /mThe stumbling block was I wasn’t putting the file path in quotes and the “/M” is required to set it as a system variable.