How to force Rails 4 app into production mode in Nginx and Unicorn?

Question

I am running a Rails 4 app on a VPS with Ubuntu, NginX and Unicorn.

When I SSL into my server and update the app via git or run rake tasks on the database, my app always switches to development mode and I can't get it into production mode.

Typing RAILS_ENV=production seems to have no effect at all.

When I do

$ rails console
$ Rails.env

I get

--> development

all the time.

What must I do to force NginX into production mode?

Actually, I don't want Nginx to ever run in development mode.

How can this be achieved?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Your application is probably running in production mode by default. What you're doing is engaging a shell, something using a different environment.

Normally on a production server you'd put this into your profile script:

# Add to ~/.bash_profile
export RAILS_ENV=production

That way when you power up rails c you will get the correct environment.

As a note, the only way this shell is engaging in the first place is that you have a development setting in your config/database.yml. That shouldn't be there, as the configuration for your production server should be production-only.

Answer 2

nginx doesn't run in development or production mode - your app does, via your unicorn configuration and/or the RAILS_ENV environment variable when you launch your unicorn instances.

You should be launching your unicorn instances with the RAILS_ENV variable prefixed to the command, eg:

RAILS_ENV=production bundle exec unicorn -c config/unicorn.rb -D

rails console launches a completely different instance which may be in an different environment - it is unrelated to your unicorn instances. If you want to launch a production console instance, then either invoke RAILS_ENV=production rails console or rails console production. Note that this has no bearing on the environment that your application runs in.