Kettle variables and the Kettle home directory
As explained in the Kettle Variables section in Chapter 3, Manipulating Real-world Data you can define Kettle variables in the kettle.properties file. This file is located in the .kettle folder in your home directory. Pan and Kitchen recognize the variables defined in this file in the same way that Spoon does. The .kettle folder is referred to as the Kettle home directory.
If you want to run a job or a transformation for a particular set of variables that are different from those defined in the default Kettle home directory, you may want to create a copy of this folder in a different place, define your variables in the new kettle.properties file, and change the value of the KETTLE_HOME variable. Supposing that the new location is /opt/pentaho_test, you can change the value by running export KETTLE_HOME=/opt/pentaho_test before running Pan or Kitchen.
