Environment variables on production

Question

I’m currently deploying my Rails application on Amazon and I’m facing a problem with environment variables.

I'm using the dotenv gem on development and testing and it works just fine while trying to access my environment variables, but in production it does not seem to work. I read that the dotenv gem isn't meant to work on production. I have to set almost 20 different environment variables including API keys, etc., I'm deploying with rubber/capistrano.

How can I get this working in a clean way?

Answer 1

The dotenv-deployment readme mentions how you can use it in a production environment:

If you're using Capistrano 3+:

Just add .env to your list of linked_files:

set :linked_files, %w{.env}

If you're using Capistrano 2.x.x version:

In your config/deploy.rb file:

require "dotenv/capistrano"

It will symlink the .env located in /path/to/shared in the new release.

Remember to add :production group to the dotenv-rails gem in your application's Gemfile:

gem 'dotenv-rails', :groups => [:development, :test, :production]

Answer 2

You could use the figaro gem. I am using this and it works fine in production.

Answer 3

In Capistrano 3 add require "dotenv/rails-now" to your Capfile. This will make sure that capistrano has access to the environment as well.

(We had issues with capistrano accessing the API token for appsignal, so capistrano wasn't able to notify appsignal when a new deploy was done)