Normally when rails environment is run by typing. This just runs the default environment which is usually development
rails s
The specific environment can be selected by using the flag -e for example:
rails s -e test
Which will run the test environment.
The default environment can be change...
If running on a remote server that is using Passenger change apache.conf to to the environment you want to use. For example this case you see RailsEnv production.
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName application_name.rails.local
DocumentRoot "/Users/rails/application_name/public"
...
