Where to put environment variables when using nginx and Passenger on Ubuntu

Question

I was trying to set up a system similar to heroku where I would store secret keys in environmental variables and then access them from my rails app like this:

secret = ENV['EMAIL_PASSWORD'] 

I know heroku lets you do heroku config:add EMAIL_PASSWORD=secret, and I wanted to do something like that for my own ubuntu box running nginx and Passenger.

Should I add these variables as exports in .bashrc or .bash_login so that on system reboot these variables are automatically set?

I'm not sure when each of those files gets read in.

Answer 1

You can use dotenv gem which loads the .env file as environmental variables. You can generate the .env file for different environments, and need not be rather should not checked into your repository.

Answer 2

Keep in mind that nginx may not be running under the same environment as you are, and usually (pronounced "Apache") we add env-vars in the server config file via SetEnv. However, nginx doesn't have such a feature... nor does it need one, I believe.

sudo -E /usr/local/sbin/nginx 

When running nginx for it to be aware of your own user env vars.

Or, check out the env command (see here):

env EMAIL_PASSWORD=secret 

To answer your question, yes, you should use export statements in your shell config files.