Desired behavior

When connected via ssh, "pip" (and other tools) should be available, just like they are in a "normal" terminal.

Also all the environment variables that are present in normal terminal sessions should be available in a ssh session (or in a shell opened via ssh).

Current behavior

Trying to execute "pip" gives a "command not found" error when connected through ssh, but the command works properly when executed in a normal terminal.

Setup

The ssh daemon is running in a docker container based on the image . It is exposed as port 30022.

Opening /bin/bash as an interactive terminal into the container works as expected with all the tools available and environment variables set. The user inside the container is the default (root) user - same when connecting through ssh.

The ssh connection is done using a rsa keypair with the pubkey added in the container's /root/.ssh/authorized_keys.

Things tried

Connecting with ssh -p 30022 root@localhost, or ssh -p 30022 root@localhost -t "bash -l" didn't give a shell with the desired behavior.

Executing su - in a ssh session didn't help.

Doing source /root/.bashrc in a ssh session didn't help either.

1 Answer

Solved

Solution based on

For anyone having the same problem:

This problem was docker specific. The environment variables are set in the Dockerfile nvidia's image is built from. To restore the environment variables in a ssh session, I added RUN env > /etc/environment to my Dockerfile that's using the nvidia image as a base.

The file is read and used to populate the environment on ssh sessions as well, which also solves the missing $PATH entries responsible for the "command not found" error when calling pip or other tools.