Starting Merb's Interactive Console in Production Mode

Today I finally got a small internal merb application deployed. As part of the deployment process I ran into a number of small problems that I had to work through. One of the “problems” was my inability to figure out how to run merb’s interactive console in production mode. In Rails land one can start script/server in production mode by passing RAILS_ENV=production on the command line. I assumed I’d be able to do the same with merb and thus tried:

$> bin/merb -i MERB_ENV=production

Unfortunately, that dumped me into development mode. After a little bit of googling I eventualy figured out that I needed to put my MERB_ENV=production before merb -i, like so:

A small minor difference that cost me 30 minutes of time that I would have rather spent on other things. Oh well, such is life when you’re learning a new framework.