Rails env vs RAILS ENV

Question

I see both in examples when checking what env one is running in   What s preferred   Are they  for all intents and purposes equal

User · Answer

Before Rails 2 x the preferred way to get the current environment was using the RAILS ENV constant  Likewise  you can use RAILS DEFAULT LOGGER to get the current logger or RAILS ROOT to get the path to the root folder   Starting from Rails 2 x  Rails introduced the Rails module with some special methods    Rails root Rails env Rails logger   This isn t just a cosmetic change  The Rails module offers capabilities not available using the standard constants such as StringInquirer support  There are also some slight differences  Rails root doesn t return a simple String buth a Path instance   Anyway  the preferred way is using the Rails module  Constants are deprecated in Rails 3 and will be removed in a future release  perhaps Rails 3 1

User · Answer

According to the docs   Rails env wraps RAILS ENV         File vendor rails railties lib initializer rb  line 55      def env          env     ActiveSupport  StringInquirer new RAILS ENV       end   But  look at specifically how it s wrapped  using ActiveSupport  StringInquirer      Wrapping a string in this class gives   you a prettier way to test for   equality  The value returned by   Rails env  is wrapped in a   StringInquirer  object so instead of   calling this   Rails env     production        you can call this   Rails env production     So they aren t exactly equivalent  but they re fairly close   I haven t used Rails much yet  but I d say  Rails env is certainly the more visually attractive option due to using StringInquirer

User · Answer

Strange behaviour while debugging my app  require  active support notifications   rdb 1  p ENV  RAILS ENV    test   rdb 1  p Rails env  development   I would say that you should stick to one or another  and preferably Rails env

User · Answer

Update  in Rails 3 0 9   env method defined in railties lib rails rb

User · Answer

ENV  RAILS ENV   is now deprecated    You should use Rails env which is clearly much nicer

[ruby-on-rails] Rails.env vs RAILS_ENV

Examples related to ruby-on-rails