Setting Environment Variable for nginx and Rails consumption

Question

Apache's module mod_env offers a handy way of setting environment variables in configuration files, like:

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName xyz.com DocumentRoot /var/www/rails_app/public PassengerAppRoot /var/www/rails_app SetEnv MY_VARIABLE contents </VirtualHost> 

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_env.html#setenv

However, in nginx I couldn't find anything that serves the same purpose. What's the alternative here? I thought of setting environment variables in .profile files (I am using Ubuntu 10.04), but that wouldn't have the same "per vHost" isolation I have with Apache, right?

What are the alternatives here?

Answer 1

FastCGI Param for fastcgi passing or Proxy Set Header for when proxy passing.

Answer 2

Why not just create a launcher script that sets the needed enviroment variables before it calls nginx or rails .. and have one scipt per instance?

Answer 3

fastcgi_params will allow you to set environment variables easily. Here's an example of adding environment variables using fastcgi params with php-fpm:

 location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param MY_VARIABLE contents; include fastcgi_params; }