Elastic Beanstalk, Rails 5, and Passenger: Rails.env frustration

Question

I have a stack in Elastic Beanstalk running the "Passenger with Ruby 2.5 running on 64bit Amazon Linux/2.8.3" image. Rails is v5.2.1. The desire is to make it a staging environment i.e., have 'Rails.env' return 'staging' and run off of a staging.rb configuration. The problem is, it seems to be running as 'production' no matter what I do.

• I set up RACK_ENV and RAILS_ENV as EB configuration variables, both set to 'staging'. I confirmed their existence on the server with 'printenv' as ec2-user, webapp, and root.
• I tried changing passenger_app_env in the Passenger config to 'staging'. I've confirmed that Passenger Standalone is using the correct config by looking at the process with 'ps aux | grep passenger'.
• I've tried switching to the root server and manually doing '/etc/init.d/passenger stop' and then 'start', and the printout confirms Passenger is launching with its 'environment' set to 'staging':

=============== Phusion Passenger Standalone web server started =============== PID file: /var/app/support/pids/passenger.pid Log file: /var/app/support/logs/passenger.log Environment: staging Accessible via: http://0.0.0.0/ Serving in the background as a daemon. Problems? Check https://www.phusionpassenger.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Standalone.html#troubleshooting

• I put this into environment.rb and added an EB config var for STAGING to be 'true'.:

  
    if ENV['STAGING']
      %w(RACK_ENV RAILS_ENV).each do |key|
        ENV[key] = 'staging'
      end
    end

However, the test page I made in my Rails app still says 'Rails.env' is 'production', and is not using values from 'staging.rb'. And yet, that same test page says that 'ENV['RACK_ENV']' and 'ENV['RAILS_ENV'] are both set to 'staging'.

At this point, I'm out of ideas on how to force the environment in any other way.

Answer 1

After much hacking, I discovered that Passenger was launching with a passenger_app_env of 'production' (its default) and then switching over to 'staging'. Rails.env would get the the 'production' env and use 'production.rb', then RACK_ENV and RAILS_ENV would be overwritten to 'staging', creating the confusing duality.

The solution was moving the passenger_app_env directive higher up in the Passenger Standalone template that Passenger uses; we had it inside of a server directive inside of an http directive. Moving it up out of the server directive and into the http directive itself solved the issue.