No soup for you, userSetup.py

When I start working on isolating maya environments, I came across a nice bit of trivia I didn’t know about.

If you ever want to run a Maya without its userSetup.py and without having to move or rename files, it turns out you can suppress userSetups by setting an environment variable called MAYA_SKIP_USERSETUP_PY to any value that evaluates as True. This is handy for testing and isolating path management problems - if you’ve got a rogue path and you’re not sure where it’s coming from, this is an easy way to make sure it’s not being added in by the userSetup.

PS: If you’re using a MayaPyManager to run mayapy instances, you can set this variable like so:

from mayaPyManager import MayaPyManager  
import os

env = os.environ.copy()  
env['MAYA_SKIP_USERSETUP_PY'] = '1'  
mgr = MayaPyManager('path/to/mayapy.exe', env, 'path/to/maya/scripts')  
# this manager will use only the user provided path  
# and won't run the userSetup.py on startup