DigitalOcean Kubernetes: new control plane is faster and free, enable HA for 99.95% uptime SLA

Question

How to force NginX into production mode in Rails 4?

  • Posted June 13, 2014

I am running a Rails 4 app on a VPS with Ubuntu, NginX and Unicorn.

When I SSL into my server and update the app via git or run rake tasks on the database, my app always switches to development mode and I can’t get it into production mode.

Typing RAILS_ENV=production seems to have no effect at all.

When I do

$ rails console
$ Rails.env

I get

–> development

all the time.

What must I do to force NginX into production mode?

Actually, I don’t want Nginx to ever run in development mode.

How can this be achieved?

Thanks for any help.

Subscribe
Share
Submit an answer
You can type!ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Tintin • November 24, 2018

Hi Andrew,

4 years on and I’m still struggling with this issue :-)

This is my upstart (?) script inside /etc/init.d:

#!/bin/sh

### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          unicorn
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $all
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the unicorn app server
# Description:       starts unicorn using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO

set -e

USAGE="Usage: $0 <start|stop|restart|upgrade|rotate|force-stop>"

# app settings
USER="rails"
APP_NAME="MyApp"
APP_ROOT="/home/$USER/$APP_NAME"
ENV="production"

# environment settings
PATH="/home/$USER/.rbenv/shims:/home/$USER/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"
CMD="cd $APP_ROOT; ~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv exec bundle exec unicorn -D -c $APP_ROOT/config/unicorn.rb -E production"
PID="$APP_ROOT/shared/pids/unicorn.pid"
OLD_PID="$PID.oldbin"

# make sure the app exists
cd $APP_ROOT || exit 1

sig () {
  test -s "$PID" && kill -$1 `cat $PID`
}

oldsig () {
  test -s $OLD_PID && kill -$1 `cat $OLD_PID`
}

case $1 in
  start)
    sig 0 && echo >&2 "Already running" && exit 0
    echo "Starting $APP_NAME"
    su - $USER -c "$CMD"
    ;;
  stop)
    echo "Stopping $APP_NAME"
    sig QUIT && exit 0
    echo >&2 "Not running"
    ;;
  force-stop)
    echo "Force stopping $APP_NAME"
    sig TERM && exit 0
    echo >&2 "Not running"
    ;;
  restart|reload|upgrade)
    sig USR2 && echo "reloaded $APP_NAME" && exit 0
    echo >&2 "Couldn't reload, starting '$CMD' instead"
    $CMD
    ;;
  rotate)
    sig USR1 && echo rotated logs OK && exit 0
    echo >&2 "Couldn't rotate logs" && exit 1
    ;;
  *)
    echo >&2 $USAGE
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

As far as I can tell the Rails environment gets set to production but I might be wrong.

Would be glad if you could have another look.

Thanks!

Larry Fransson • June 13, 2014

It’s not nginx that is running in development mode. It’s your application. When you start your application with unicorn_rails, pass -E production to start it in production mode.