Setting environment variables in engineyard

Question

I know from heroku that it’s possible to add environment variables by running heroku config:add MY_ENV_VAR=123 locally. How can I achieve the same thing with engineyard?

Answer 1

We ran into the same issue and asked EngineYard for some assistance. Jim Neath from EY came back with the following response:

Unfortunately, passenger does not get passed environment variables from the system. What you need to do is create a ruby wrapper that defines your environment variables and launch passenger using this, as described here:

http://blog.phusion.nl/2008/12/16/passing-environment-variables-to-ruby-from-phusion-passenger/

I have created you a basic custom chef recipe that will do just this:

https://github.com/jimneath/ey-cloud-recipes/tree/master/cookbooks/passenger_env_vars

You will need to update the following file with your environment variables:

/ey-cloud-recipes/blob/master/cookbooks/passenger_env_vars/templates/default/env.custom.erb

Answer 2

I don't think you can =/.

One work-around that we use with our Rails applications is to ssh (ey ssh) to EngineYard and create a file in vim /data/your_app_name/shared/config/exports.rb. This file can look something like this:

ENV["AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"] = "your key"
ENV["AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"] = "your secret"
ENV["AWS_BUCKET"] = "your bucket"

Then in config/boot.rb you require the file:

require File.expand_path('./exports', File.dirname(__FILE__))

This is neither pretty, nor effortless. It however let you use secrets in your app that you should not check into source control!

Answer 3

This is pretty simple for Unicorn using env.custom. Take a look at my answer here https://stackoverflow.com/a/13741463/1520775

Answer 4

If you want to run a rake task (i.e. cron job) that needs these environmental variables, store the variables in /data/my_app/shared/config/env.custom

source /data/my_app/shared/config/env.custom && cd /data/my_app/current/ && bundle exec rake my_rake_task