section22.1.md

Section 22.1: Setting NODE_ENV="production"

Production deployments will vary in many ways, but a standard convention when deploying in production is to define an environment variable called NODE_ENV and set its value to "production". Runtime flags Any code running in your application (including external modules) can check the value of NODE_ENV :

if(process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
  // We are running in production mode
} else {
  // We are running in development mode
}

Dependencies

When the NODE_ENV environment variable is set to 'production' all devDependencies in your package.json file will be completely ignored when running npm install . You can also enforce this with a --production flag:

• npm install --production