How do I get Rails to recognize environment variables defined in config/environment_variables.yml?

Question

With Rails 5, if I create a file, config/environment_variables.yml, that contains

development:
  MY_VAR: abcdef

What do I need to do to get the Rails environment to recognized that environment variable? Right now, when I go to my console (by typing "rails console") on my local machine, it isn't turning up anything ...

2.4.0 :001 > ENV['MY_VAR']
 => nil

Answer 1

If you don't wish to use a gem, you can place this in your config/application.rb

# Load application ENV vars and merge with existing ENV vars. Loaded here so you can use the values in initializers.
ENV.update YAML.load_file('config/application.yml')[Rails.env] rescue {}

Then your config/application.yml file should look like:

development:
  API_KEY: 12345

staging:
  API_KEY: 67890

Be sure to restart your server, then you can access the variables as you desire with ENV['API_KEY'] .