Mac OS: Setting the environment for new processes started by Spotlight

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From http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135688/setting-environment-variables-in-os-x/3756686

Setting the environment for new processes started by Spotlight
You can set the environment used by launchd (and, by extension, anything started from Spotlight) with launchctl setenv. For example to set the path:

launchctl setenv PATH /opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
Or if you want to set up your path in .bashrc or similar, then have it mirrored in launchd:

PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
launchctl setenv PATH $PATH
There's no need to reboot though you will need to restart an app if you want it to pick up the changed environment.

This includes any shells already running under Terminal.app, although if you're there you can set the environment more directly, e.g. with export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH for bash or zsh.

Changes will be lost after a reboot
To keep changes after a reboot you can set the environment variables from /etc/launchd.conf, like so:

setenv PATH /opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
launchd.conf is executed automatically when you reboot.

If you want these changes to take effect now, you should use this command to reprocess launchctl.conf (thanks @mklement for the tip!)

egrep -v '^\s*#' /etc/launchd.conf | launchctl
You can find out more about launchctl and how it loads launchd.conf with the command man launchctl.