NGINX and environment variables from configuration file - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to set some environment variables to nginx via it's configuration file. I'm using nginx/0.8.53 and it's not working.
server {
listen 80;
server_name localdictus;
root /opt/vdmo_dictus/public; # <--- be sure to point to 'public'!
passenger_enabled on;
rails_env development;
env VDMO_MANDANT = "somevalue";
}
This is the error message:
unknown directive "env" in /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf:43
The documentation tells me that there is an "env" command... so what I'm doing wrong ??
http://wiki.nginx.org/CoreModule#env
setting the environment variables via export on the shell is not an option for my application by the way.
Here are the lines:
37: server {
38: listen 80;
39: server_name localdictus;
40: root /opt/vdmo_dictus/public; # <--- be sure to point to 'public'!
41: passenger_enabled on;
42: rails_env development;
43: env VDMO_MANDANT = "somevalue";
44: }
Regards,
Alex

Answer 1

From the documentation you linked to the "Context" for the env directive is main, not server. Put the directive outside of your server { ... } block (outside of any block).
See also this discussion. I do not believe that the env directive does what you are looking for.

Answer 2

Don't pass the env directive. Just use the -E flag when starting nginx:
sudo -E /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

Answer 3

A solution for setting the environment variables for a rails app using nginx.
Your RAILS_ROOT , for example, is : /opt/myapp_MANDANT
Then the following code would extract MANDANT from the RAILS_ROOT path and set in to the rails env.
split = RAILS_ROOT.split("_")
puts split.inspect
if split.size > 1
ENV['VDMO_SYSTEM'] = split[2]
ENV['VDMO_MANDANT'] = split[1]
elsif split.size > 0
ENV['VDMO_SYSTEM'] = nil
ENV['VDMO_MANDANT'] = split[1]
end
put this code in your environment.rb file to work.
A nice way for using this approch is mount with the --bind option.
Example:
mkdir railsapp_mandant
mount -t /originalsource /railsapp_mandant
then set the public path of the rails app to to /originalsource/public/ instead of /railsapp_mandant/public/