Use Phusion Passenger on nginx with RAILS_ENV

How to

Phusion passenger sets Rails' environment variable as production by default and doesn't see ENV in shell. To change this value, you can change passenger_app_env in nginx configuration file.

passenger_app_env staging;

Handle it in Docker container

I have Docker environment for staging. To set up this in my environment, I added another configuration file in starting script used in Dockerfile.

# Dockerfile

# Some setup commands...
ENV RAILS_ENV production # This is default value. It will be overwritten by `--env` option.

CMD ['start.sh']

# starting script; start.sh

# Add nginx configuration for setting `passenger_app_env` as RAILS_ENV
RUN echo "passenger_app_env $RAILS_ENV;" > /opt/nginx/conf/00_app_env.conf

rake db:migrate && \
    /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx

ref:

• passenger-docker/README.md · phusion/passenger-docker
• passenger-docker/30_presetup_nginx.sh · phusion/passenger-docker