How do I see the ENV vars in a Rails app?

Question

I am taking over an old Rails app. No one has touched it in a year. The last developer left in April of 2015 and I have no way to contact him. I do have ssh access to the server, and I have access to the Github repo.

I don't know any of the usernames/passwords.

If I ssh to the server and I cat the database.yml file, I see stuff like:

  staging:
        adapter: mysql2
        encoding: utf8
        pool: 5
        socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
        database: o_wawa_stage
        username: wawa_stage
        password: <%= ENV['STAGE_DATABASE_PASSWORD'] %>
        host: access.dmedia.com

If I run the "printenv" command then I don't see any of these vars. I assume they are only loaded by the Rails environment.

I guess I can edit the templates to spit out the values with a bunch of "put" statements, but I'm thinking there must be a more obvious way to do this, other than printing the data where the public could see it?

If I try to run "rails console" I get:

  Rails Error: Unable to access log file. Please ensure that /var/www/haha/production/releases/20150118213616/log/development.log exists and is writable (ie, make it writable for user and group: chmod 0664 /var/www/haha/production/releases/20150118213616/log/development.log). The log level has been raised to WARN and the output directed to STDERR until the problem is fixed.

I don't have sudo on this box, so I can not address the error.

Answer 1

Assuming the staging environment, as your example points to. You'll want to load the console by prepending the RAILS_ENV environment variable to the rails console command.

RAILS_ENV=staging rails console

That should get you in. Once you're in, you can just access the ENV variable directly.

2.2.2 (main):0 > ENV

And that will dump out the environment variables for you. Note, your prompt may look different. If you want to access a specific value, such as the database password, you can:

2.2.2 (main):0 > ENV['STAGE_DATABASE_PASSWORD']

Answer 2

Within your app directory, simply launch the Rails Console:

rails c

Then at the prompt:

ENV

This will list all loaded environmental variables for whichever environment you last exported.

Sorry, after posting this, I realized that the author had already tried to use rails console with errors...but I am fairly sure this should always work. You can't ask for printenv or env within the console, you must use all caps "ENV"