Passing environment variables to mongrel

The Rails app I’m working on requires an environment variable to be set.
I
thought I could do this in my cap deploy script. Unfortunately, it seems
that the Mongrel processes that are started up by Mongrel Cluster have
their
own environments and any environment variables set in the deploy script
aren’t passed on. I was able to verify this by having my deploy script
run a
rake task that outputs the value of of the environment variable I need

the value is what I’d expect. I then set the Rails app to add that same
environment variable in a log message, and it shows that the value is
nil.
Does anyone have any suggestions for setting an environment variable?

Thanks!

Never mind; turns out this is a capistrano issue (running mongrel via
sudo).
Thanks!

Jenny,

Environment variables can be defined in the /etc/init.d/
mongrel_cluster script.

Bill S.