Styjun

I have deployed an app to digitalocean using the Ruby on Rails image. It is set up by default with a user called rails. My rails.service file looks like:

[Unit] 
Description=OneMathsExamQuestions 
Requires=network.target 

[Service] 
Type=simple 
User=rails 
Group=rails 
WorkingDirectory=/home/rails/one_maths_exam_questions/ 
ExecStart=/bin/bash -lc 'bundle exec puma' 
TimeoutSec=30s 
RestartSec=30s 
Restart=always 

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target 

I need to use some environment variables in my application. So I have added some lines to my /home/rails/.bashrc and /root/.bashrc files (I suspect only the first one should be necessary but neither seems to work):

export A="val1"
export B="val2"
...

Now: if I call echo $A in a terminal I get the expected output. If I go into the Rails console and do ENV["A"] I get the expected output. But my app does not seem to behave correctly (the desired behaviour is connecting to Amazon S3; the exact error is not important).

If I go into my controller and explicitly log the env vars with Rails.logger.debug ENV I just get ENV, and Rails.logger.debug ENV["A"] returns empty string (I guess nil). Similarly if I try to do ENV["RAILS_ENV"] which should definitely work, I get the same. But Rails.env returns "development", as expected.

Moreover, if I explicitly write

ENV["A"] = "val1"
ENV["B"] = "val2"
...

in my config/application.rb, the app works correctly. But this is obviously not a permanent solution, since I can't commit this to version control.

I'm not using the figaro gem, which I think a lot of places are suggesting, but I don't see why I should have to since it works just fine on my local machine.

OK, it looks like if I export my environment variables in .profile then they are picked up by the server no problem. If I remove them from .bashrc then the server has no problems, but I can't get the variables in terminal. I guess they just do different things?