Phusion Passenger 4 & nginx cannot see environment variables in Ubuntu Linux

Question

According to the documentation at https://www.phusionpassenger.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Nginx.html#env_vars_passenger_apps 15.3.5 Phusion Passenger should be reading environmental variables from .bashrc. I am trying to run a rails 4.2 application from a user account named rails using nginx and Phusion passenger and get a 502 bad gateway error when I try to load it in the browser. The process operates under the correct user. When I open a ruby console in the rails app directory I see the environment variables from my bashrc including secret_key_base. However when I tail my nginx log the error I get is that it is not able to find secret_key_base. I have tried adding this elsewhere including /etc/bash.bashrc and /etc/nginx.conf.

Answer 1

I have found the answer to this horrible question. The answer is at https://github.com/phusion/passenger/wiki/Debugging-application-startup-problems under the heading "Early Termination in Bash". It turns out that the Ubuntu .bashrc does not run if the shell is not interactive. Phusion Passenger does not run in an interactive shell. Therefore we do not load these environment variables for the Phusion Passenger process.

Mike's comment was on track. If you are using rvm then nginx points to a ruby script that you can put the environment variables in before ruby starts.

passenger_ruby /home/rails/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.2.1@was_i_towed/wrappers/ruby;

Is a line in my nginx.conf file. If I open this wrapper in vi or nano then I can add the EXPORT SECRET= to the top of the file and it works.

Other literature suggests that setting the environment variables in /etc/environment should also work.

This issue should also be rendered moot when upgrading to Phusion Passenger 5 which has a facility for specifying environment variables in nginx.conf.