David Kimura PRO said over 4 years ago on Deploying to AWS Elastic Beanstalk :
  In this example, the SECRECT_KEY_BASE is an environment variable and is used in the config/secrets.yml.  Within AWS Beanstalk's Configuration Overview (Elastic Beanstalk > Environments > Your App > Configuration), you can create an Environment Property which is where you set the environment variables. Any environment variable set here will be available to the EC2 instances that are created.