Why are my Rails initializers caching ENV variables in the console (Foreman, Dev env)

Question

What started as a minor annoyance has now turned into a headache. I am building a Rails 4 app and am using Foreman for my dev setup with a Procfile and .env file for configuration. When I set an ENV variable in the .env file, it is correctly picked up by my app. In this case I am setting some ENV options for Paperclip in an initializer.

The problem surfaces when I go to change the value of the ENV variables. In the console, if I type ENV["MY_VAR"], it shows the new value. However, the value that was used in my initializer, which presumably was run when I started the console, shows the old value! Nowhere in my project is the old value listed anywhere. This leads me to believe that the environment is being cached somehow or that the env variables are being exported to my shell. I'm running out of places to look so any help would be greatly appreciated! I am developing on a Mac (10.9.4) with Ruby 1.9.3-p374 and Rails 4.1.0.

Example:

ROOT/.env

S3_BUCKET=mybucket

config/initializers/paperclip.rb

Paperclip::Attachment.default_options[:s3_credentials] = {bucket: ENV["S3_BUCKET"]}

If I change the value of S3_BUCKET to "newbucket" and run "foreman run rails c" or "rails c" to enter the console, this is what happens:

ENV["S3_BUCKET"] # => "newbucket"
Paperclip::Attachment.default_options[:s3_credentials] # => {bucket: 'mybucket'}

I should mention that this behavior also occurs in my classes that I've put in /lib. I imagine this is all due to something silly that I've overlooked. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you're using Rails 4 out of the box, it comes with a gem called Spring that's intended to make your life easier by preloading an instance of your application in the background and reloading it as your code and configuration files change.

Spring, however, only monitors Rails' default configuration files, so you'll need to configure Spring to monitor additional any other files that you wish to trigger a reload.

Spring reads ~/.spring.rb and config/spring.rb for custom settings. You can add add the following line to the file of your choosing to watch your .env file for changes:

Spring.watch '.env'

See Spring's configuration documentation in the README for more info.