How do I see the ENV vars in a Rails app?

Question

I am taking over an old Rails app. No one has touched it in a year. The last developer left in April of 2015 and I have no way to contact him. I do have ssh access to the server, and I have access to the Github repo.

I don't know any of the usernames/passwords.

If I ssh to the server and I cat the database.yml file, I see stuff like:

  staging:
        adapter: mysql2
        encoding: utf8
        pool: 5
        socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
        database: o_wawa_stage
        username: wawa_stage
        password: <%= ENV['STAGE_DATABASE_PASSWORD'] %>
        host: access.dmedia.com

If I run the "printenv" command then I don't see any of these vars. I assume they are only loaded by the Rails environment.

I guess I can edit the templates to spit out the values with a bunch of "put" statements, but I'm thinking there must be a more obvious way to do this, other than printing the data where the public could see it?

If I try to run "rails console" I get:

  Rails Error: Unable to access log file. Please ensure that /var/www/haha/production/releases/20150118213616/log/development.log exists and is writable (ie, make it writable for user and group: chmod 0664 /var/www/haha/production/releases/20150118213616/log/development.log). The log level has been raised to WARN and the output directed to STDERR until the problem is fixed.

I don't have sudo on this box, so I can not address the error.

Solution 1

Assuming the staging environment, as your example points to. You'll want to load the console by prepending the RAILS_ENV environment variable to the rails console command.

RAILS_ENV=staging rails console

That should get you in. Once you're in, you can just access the ENV variable directly.

2.2.2 (main):0 > ENV

And that will dump out the environment variables for you. Note, your prompt may look different. If you want to access a specific value, such as the database password, you can:

2.2.2 (main):0 > ENV['STAGE_DATABASE_PASSWORD']

Solution 2

Within your app directory, simply launch the Rails Console:

rails c

Then at the prompt:

ENV

This will list all loaded environmental variables for whichever environment you last exported.

Sorry, after posting this, I realized that the author had already tried to use rails console with errors...but I am fairly sure this should always work. You can't ask for printenv or env within the console, you must use all caps "ENV"

Comments

[lorm]

That would only be true if we were using the Figaro gem, yes?

[lorm]

This returns nothing: find . -name application.yml

[lorm]

This returns nothing: find . -name env.yml

[lorm]

"find . -name *.yml" returns over a 100 files, but nothing with "application" or "env" in the name.

[Julian Guterman]

Yes figaro or envyous, although if the prev dev was using ENV variables they must be stored somewhere, unless the code was pushed to github in which you pulled from when that .yml file was inside of the .gitignore

[Julian Guterman]

If it weren't over 100 files I would say look through them, but try checking specifically inside /config for *.yml

[lorm]

If I run "grep -iR DATABASE_PASSWORD *" I find nothing that sets the ENV. Whatever sets the ENV variables, it is outside of the project. I would guess it is perhaps set by the Capistrano scripts that initiate the project.

[lorm]

Is there a way I can tell "rails console" where to find the log? The log is at "/var/www/wawa/production/shared/log" but rails console is looking for it in "/var/www/wawa/production/log" and it throws an error because it can't find it.

[Josh Deeden]

Have a look inside of config/application.rb and config/enivornments/production.rb for any lines that look like config.logger. It's usually in one of those two files where logging configuration is overwritten. guides.rubyonrails.org/configuring.html might be helpful too.