I am using webbrick or Mongrel in development mode and Apache + fcgi in production mode on my site5 server (I'd recommand them, they are very reactive).

I have read that you're supposed to set ENV['RAILS_ENV'] to 'production' in environment.rb
As I am using capistrano de deploy my webapplication, I have tried to move that setting to dispatch.fcgi and it works! No need to get 2 versions of environment.rb (1 for developement & test and 1 for production)

Maybe there is a more elegant solution, I'd love to hear about it!