Rails console default environment

Question

On my development machine:

$ bundle exec rails console
Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.3)
1.9.3p194 :001 > Rails.env
 => "development"

This is expected. So far, so good.

Yet on my production server (to which I have deployed using Capistrano), I get exactly the same result:

$ bundle exec rails console
Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.3)
1.9.3p194 :001 > Rails.env
 => "development"

On either machine, I can instead do:

$ bundle exec rails console production
Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.3)
1.9.3p194 :001 > Rails.env
 => "production"

My question is: on the production server, shouldn't bundle exec rails console load the production environment by default, instead of the development environment? And if not, why not?

Zared

Thanks. This answered my question on how to run rails console as production. It does not follow the same pattern as rails server -e production. – Lueluebke

Answer 1

The rails executable can't know which environment should run on which machine.

you can put export RAILS_ENV=production in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile file of the user you want to start the console with.

Gilbertina

Answer 2

RAILS_ENV is a variable like any other which will always default to development

if you like you can always open up '~/.bash_profile' on the production server and add this:

 alias sc="bundle exec rails console production"

then run source ~/.bash_profile to reload that file for your terminal session and you can just call sc to load up console.

Hulda