Blender 2.8 creating a USER folder outside the main portable folder?

Hey guys,

I thought if I downloaded the Blender 2.8 zip it would be contained to that folder. However, I’ve noticed it keeps creating a USER folder deep inside my computer with some preferences.

How do I stop this behaviour? According to Blender manual, that should not happen and every single setting should be contained inside the main extracted zip folder.

That is the normal behavior however you can modify where and how Blender looks for settings. See these Env variables.

Environment Variables:
  $BLENDER_USER_CONFIG      Directory for user configuration files.
  $BLENDER_USER_SCRIPTS     Directory for user scripts.
  $BLENDER_SYSTEM_SCRIPTS   Directory for system wide scripts.
  $BLENDER_USER_DATAFILES   Directory for user data files (icons, translations, ..).
  $BLENDER_SYSTEM_DATAFILES Directory for system wide data files.
  $BLENDER_SYSTEM_PYTHON    Directory for system Python libraries.
  $TMP or $TMPDIR           Store temporary files here.
  $SDL_AUDIODRIVER          LibSDL audio driver - alsa, esd, dma.
  $PYTHONHOME               Path to the Python directory, eg. /usr/lib/python.

Oh thanks, I thought it was not normal behaviour at all.

Okay so how precisely do I change those? All I have is this on my preferences panel:

This is Linux? Inside your extracted zip location there’s a directory named 2.80. Try creating a directory named config inside the 2.80 directory (so …/myunzipspot/2.80/config ) and then start Blender and see if it comes up clean (will then prompt you for your left or right click preference etc. in the initial splash screen).

This works on Windows and will cause it to keep everything inside your unzip directory as you were expecting, but I’m not certain about Linux. On MacOS it’s different.

1 Like

Same procedure (as last .,… noooo) for Linux. But this looks like a Mac.

YES!

This did the trick! It was MacOS.

Thanks!