Passing Environment Variables to the nginx web server

I need to write this down for future reference...

With the Apache web server you can pass environment variables to Rails applications, etc by specifying them using SetEnv in your configuration file. But with nginx you don't do this - or at least you don't need to.

When you fire up the server, simply tell sudo to preserve your environment. Without that, sudo will reset all your variables. With it, they are available to nginx and your applications - nice and simple...

$ sudo -E /usr/local/sbin/nginx