I've found this process unreliable enough (is it set in the Apache user env, or httpd.conf? Why isn't it getting passed through to Passenger?) that I just put everything into a /usr/local/my-app.yml file, and explicitly load it in application.rb.
This is why I've never been a big fan of using environment variables for app configuration. It seems like a clean enough abstraction, but when you start investigating the differences between distributions, applications, and even different packages of the same application, it can get pretty unwieldy. Everyone I raise this argument with replies with something along the lines of, "It's easy if you do it <this way>!" Where <this way> is some prescribed method that works in their environment. Change one aspect of their stack, and that method no longer works. It's a failure of portability that drives me crazy. I don't like marrying myself to a specific platform to that degree.
