Rails doesn't see environment variable

Try doing spring stop followed by rails c

Spring is a rails application preloader that loads the ENV configuration. It might not have loaded the .bashrc changes in your case.

export APP_NAME_DATABASE_PASSWORD=secretkey is most likely scoping your environment variable to a bash process. Since Unicorn doesn't run as a child of bash process, it doesn't have access to this environment variable.

I'd recommend storing your ENV vars in a single place, such as application.yml and loading them into your ruby environment at the start of your application. There are some great tools that do this. I'd recommend looking into Figaro: https://github.com/laserlemon/figaro.

Here's another post relevant to your question: Re-source .bashrc when restarting unicorn?

I had a similar problem. A simple solution for you would be to run:

export RAILS_ENV=production && rails c

The reason is that when you do not use the export, the rails can not see the environment variable but you see its value when you execute echo on the console.