From: Carl Youngblood <carl@...>
Date: 2003-12-20T15:01:54+09:00
Subject: apache/mod_fastcgi - problem with DBI::DBRC

I'm trying to use Daniel Berger's handy database connection abstraction 
layer called DBI::DBRC.  One of its requirements is the the user that 
the calling script is run under must have exclusive access to the DB 
connection/password file.  This file must be in the user's home 
directory.  However, my scripts are running as the apache user, which 
happens to be called apache on default red hat 9 installations, which 
I'm running on.  Apache's home dir is in /var/www on RH9.  DBRC is 
looking for this directory in ENV['HOME'], but this environment variable 
is not set when I run my ruby scripts under Apache/mod_fastcgi.

Fine, I thought, I'll just add a directive to my Apache conf to set the 
environment right (SetEnv, to be precise).  However, that didn't seem to 
change anything.  I suspect it is because mod_fastcgi runs in a slightly 
different environment than regular Apache.  Don't know.  Anyway, two 
kludgey ways of knowing where to save the DBRC file that I can think of are:
- Calling `echo ~` still works.  I could add this to dbrc.rb.  But 
spawning a shell command seems kind of gross for this.
- Or just hard coding it in dbrc.rb, which seems equally gross, and also 
  the home directory may be different on the server that I deploy this 
app on.

Does anybody have an idea of how I can get my ruby/fastcgi scripts to 
see regular environment vars?

Thanks,
Carl