Change a Rails application to production

If you're running on Passenger, then the default is to run in production, in your apache conf:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName application_name.rails.local
  DocumentRoot "/Users/rails/application_name/public"
  RailsEnv production ## This is the default
</VirtualHost>

If you're just running a local server with mongrel or webrick, you can do:

./script/server -e production

or in bash:

RAILS_ENV=production ./script/server

actually overriding the RAILS_ENV constant in the enviornment.rb should probably be your last resort, as it's probably not going to stay set (see another answer I gave on that)

If mipadi's suggestion doesn't work, add this to config/environment.rb

# force Rails into production mode when                          
# you don't control web/app server and can't set it the proper way                  
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'

Change the environment variable RAILS_ENV to production.

You can also pass the environment to script/server:

$ script/server -e production

By default server runs on development environment: $ rails s

If you're running on production environment: $ rails s -e production or $ RAILS_ENV=production rails s