Rails 4, Mechanize, Figaro: environment variables not working in form

Question

I'm attempting to log in to a website but my env variables are not inserting properly in the necessary form. I am using Figaro and my environment variables are safely stored in config/application.yml. I can confirm two things...

1. When hard-coding my actual email and password, I am able to log in successfully

2. My environment vars return properly when testing in the Rails console (e.g. ENV["WHATEVER"] returns the proper value)

   # app/helpers/scrape_wf.rb
   
   require 'mechanize'
   
   agent = Mechanize.new
   page = agent.get('https://www.wealthfront.com/login')
   login_form = page.forms.first
   
   # LOG IN UNSUCCESSFUL
   
   login_form.email    = ENV["WF_EMAIL"] 
   login_form.password = ENV["WF_PASSWORD"]
   
   home_page = login_form.submit
   
   puts page.title          # => Log In to Wealthfront
   puts home_page.title     # => Log In to Wealthfront
   
   # LOG IN SUCCESSFUL
   
   login_form.email    = "my_harcoded_email"
   login_form.password = "my_harcoded_password"
   
   home_page = login_form.submit
   
   puts page.title          # => Log In to Wealthfront
   puts home_page.title     # => Wealthfront
   

and in the console...

    rails c
    Loading development environment (Rails 4.2.4)
    [1] pry(main)> ENV["WF_EMAIL"]
    => "my_harcoded_email"
    [2] pry(main)> ENV["WF_PASSWORD"]
    => "my_harcoded_password"

What am I doing wrong...?

Answer 1

According to this excellent post...

When you install the Figaro gem in your Rails app, any values that you enter into config/application.yml will be loaded into the ruby ENV hash on startup.

...since I am developing the script and running it from the command line (i.e. ruby such_and_such.rb) my environment variables are not being set/initialized and hence they are blank when the script executes.

Solution: Print scrape results to a view (which, confirmed, does work) rather than console.