I have read the documentation concerning falling back to environment variables at https://github.com/typesafehub/config/blob/master/HOCON.md#substitution-fallback-to-environment-variables. My understanding was that it would pickup any envars. So for instance, if from the shell I was able to do echo $HOSTNAME and see a non-empty response then HOCON should do that as well.
In my application.conf I have a line
akka.remote.netty.tcp.hostname = ${HOSTNAME}
However, my app is not happy with this and fails to start with.
/conf/application.conf: 9: Could not resolve substitution to a value: ${HOSTNAME}
Is this a user issue? A shell issue? I am able to login as the user and echo $HOSTNAME
Tagging this scala and akka since that userbase probably has the most exposure to HOCON
The reason for HOCON not picking up the envar is that my app runs as a linux service (Centos 6.5) which clears away most environment variables.
See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/44370/how-to-make-unix-service-see-environment-variables for a relevant description of the issue