> These settings should NOT be stored at the file level, it > should be handled by environment flags. I feel this is a > fundamentally broken feature.

According to https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/railties/lib/rail..., this YAML file is handled like every other YAML by Rails...it's parsed through ERB first.

That means, you can do something like

    development:
      secret_key_base: <%= ENV['RAILS_SECRET'] %>

And reference it with that `Rails.configuration` business.

With this, you basically get a nice little API for recalling env variables. Pretty neat!