how to create rails initializer for heroku config vars? - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm struggling with Heroku sending gmail with actionmailer in my Rails app.
I've got my gmail username and password correctly set as Heroku config vars, but I still get authentication errors. I finally discovered that I need to create an initializer but I'm having trouble hooking everything together. The following code brings up the correct username and password in the heroku logs, but with a NoMethodError. Not sure where to put the method to make it all work. I've tried putting it in my users_controller but that makes the whole thing crash.
I'm planning to add my S3 stuff to this initializer once I get this working.
my initializers/heroku.rb
GMAIL_CREDENTIALS = { :username => ENV['GMAIL_USERNAME'],
:password => ENV['GMAIL_PASSWORD'] }
my mailers/user_mailer.rb
class UserMailer < ActionMailer::Base
default from: "mygmailaddress", :gmail_credentials => GMAIL_CREDENTIALS
def signup_confirmation(user)
#user = user
mail to: user.email, subject: "Sign Up Confirmation"
end
end
and create in my users_controller:
def create
#user = User.new(params[:user])
if #user.save
UserMailer.signup_confirmation(#user).deliver
sign_in #user
flash[:success] = "Welcome to Plain Vanilla!"
redirect_to #user
else
render 'new'
end
end
The error message in heroku logs:
Completed 500 Internal Server Error in 482ms
app/controllers/users_controller.rb:21:in `create'
NoMethodError (undefined method `encoding' for {:username=>"mygmailusername",
:password=>"mypassword"}:Hash):
Thanks for any help!
Charlie

Answer 1

I normally put my gmail credentials in an intializer called mailer.rb. It looks like this:
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => "smtp.gmail.com",
:port => 587,
:domain => "mail.google.com",
:user_name => ENV['MY_GMAIL_USER_NAME'],
:password => ENV['MY_GMAIL_PASSWORD'],
:authentication => "plain",
:enable_starttls_auto => true
}
Where did you get the code you're using? I'd try dropping the :gmail_credentials line from your user_mailer and using an initializer that's more like mine. Don't forget to restart your app if you change these files.
Hope this helps,