Rails 4: Capistrano development environment instead of production?

Question

I am deploying the production environment of my ruby on rails application with the capistrano gem onto a virtual private server. I run the following command to deploy: ``` bundle exec cap production deploy ``` All seems to be working well unless I try to check what environment my current production release is operating in. One way I use to check this is to run: ``` rails console Rails.env ``` The answer I receive is "development" which is quite frightening. During another test: when I run the following in my current release: ``` rails db ``` I get an error that states that mydatabase_development is not created. My application seems to be running well but I do not know if this will cause major problems moving forward. First of all: Is there a way to determine if I my live copy is actually running in development? Secondly: Given that I have a problem, how do I configure capistrano to deploy a production environment?

Accepted Answer

Keep in mind that `rails console` engages in the current environment as dictated by `RAILS_ENV` or `RACK_ENV` in your environment. If you don't set up this explicitly on your server then it will probably default to `development`.

One way to fix this is to force it in your `.bash_profile` or whatever shell profile you're using. For example:

```
export RAILS_ENV=production
```

That should make it available and when you engage your Rails shell it'll kick in properly.

As a note, you shouldn't even be able to start in development mode on your production server since there shouldn't be an entry with that name in `config/database.yml`. A best practice is to store `config/database.yml` only on the production server and move it over during your Capistrano deploy.

Add this to your `config/deploy.rb`:

```
set :linked_files, %w[
  config/database.yml
]
```

Then you create a production only config in `shared/config/database.yml` that will be linked into place when you deploy. Be sure to exclude `config/database.yml` from your version control system so it doesn't get deployed.

The reason your site is probably okay is because a launcher like Passenger automatically sets `RACK_ENV` to `production` unless otherwise configured. This does not impact your shell, though, which defaults to `development`.

Rails 4: Capistrano development environment instead of production?

Solution

Problem