How do I make my Mac use .bash_profile to add extra paths after I statically set $PATH?
The bash shell actually defaults to look for ~/.bash_profile even though it may not initially exist.

After creating this file in the root directory of your user, just enter source ~/.bash_profile . This forces the bash shell to read immediately from the file and will run it's contents straight away.

As long as you have a line that looks like export PATH=&lt;directories&gt; in the file, your PATH will be set by this every time.
This helped.