For security purposes I like to keep confidential information out of my git repositories. While hosting a site with Heroku for a little while I learned that they advocate environment variables for storing sensitive information. I later switched over to my own server and wanted to replicate this setup. I threw my environment variables in the .bash_profile of the user associated with my application and found out that when ruby is started on the server a login doesn’t appear to occur for that user even though the process is owned by the user. The .bash_profile never appears to get loaded up. My environment variables weren’t being loaded up into my application as I had anticipated.