Capistrano Rails deployment with Nginx and Passenger: database credentials being ignored - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to deploy my first Rails 4 app on an EC2 instance with Capistrano 3. I've followed several tutorials on how to setup the web server with Nginx and Passenger on Ubuntu. I also have a RDS instance for the database with MySQL. But when I try to run cap deploy it gives me an error at the assets:precompile phase:
INFO [d5d05621] Running ~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv exec bundle exec rake assets:precompile as deploy#[EC2 PUBLIC IP]
(Backtrace restricted to imported tasks)
cap aborted!
SSHKit::Runner::ExecuteError: Exception while executing as deploy#[EC2 PUBLIC IP]: rake exit status: 1
rake stdout: Nothing written
rake stderr: rake aborted!
Mysql2::Error: Access denied for user 'root'#'[EC2 PRIVATE IP]' (using password: NO)
From what I understand, it's trying to connect to the database on localhost with the credentials from the development environment.
Here is what my database.yml file looks like:
development:
adapter: mysql2
encoding: utf8
pool: 5
socket: /tmp/mysql.sock
username: root
password:
database: Store_development
production:
adapter: mysql2
encoding: utf8
database: Store_production
username: <%= ENV['STORE_DATABASE_USERNAME'] %>
password: <%= ENV['STORE_DATABASE_PASSWORD'] %>
host: [RDS INSTANCE ENDPOINT]
port: 3306
pool: 5
timeout: 5000
I looked all over to search for all the places where I could specify the environment, and I ended up having something like this. In my deploy/production.rb I have:
set :stage, :production
set :rails_env, :production
I also have this in the http section of /etc/nginx/nginx.conf on my server:
passenger_app_env production;
And this in the virtual host configuration in /etc/nginx/sites-available
passenger_enabled on;
rails_env production;
And finally I have this in the .bashrc of the deploy user:
export RAILS_ENV=production
Am I missing something to make the deploy work for the production environment and connect to the RDS instance with the credentials from the database.yml file? Or is it something else?

Answer 1

Make sure that the STORE_DATABASE_USERNAME and STORE_DATABASE_PASSWORD environment variables are set on the server and visible to your Rails app. When you SSH into the EC2 instance and run the following do you get the expected values?
echo $STORE_DATABASE_USERNAME
echo $STORE_DATABASE_PASSWORD
If not, add exports for these to the .bashrc of the deploy user:
export STORE_DATABASE_USERNAME=< your username >
export STORE_DATABASE_PASSWORD=< your password >