I was caught up in excitement upon discovering pow. After setting it up, and testing it out on the project I’m working on now, I encountered a problem. My app is setup to send email using Gmail thru SMTP configured in a Rails environment config, and the email is sent using ActionMailer.

The config looks like this

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address: "smtp.gmail.com",
port: 587,
user_name: ENV["GMAIL_USERNAME"],
password: ENV["GMAIL_PASSWORD"],
authentication: :login

The emails were arriving when I tested the app by running rails server but on the local pow server, authentication errors were the norm. Clearly the environment variables weren’t being set. So I googled pow’s documentation for how to setup environment variables, ending up on this page. While reading through the linked section, I missed something critical.

“Pow attempts to execute two scripts — first .powrc, then .powenv — in the application’s root. Any environment variables exported from these scripts are passed along to Rack.”

So I idiotically set about creating a .powrc file in my user/bin directory. Obviously this did not work, but I wasted an hour or so tweaking random settings trying to get this to work. Then I re-read the page, set about to fix the problem, which I did as follows.

1. Run touch .powrc in my project’s root.
2. Edit .powrc and add the environment variables as follows: export GMAIL_USERNAME=username export GMAIL_PASSWORD="my password"
3. Restart pow’s worker for the app by running touch tmp/restart.txt

And that worked!