Heroku NODE_ENV environment variable

Question

I'm running a Node project with Heroku as my main deploy target. In dev environment I'm using grunt to start the web server, however in production I prefer to launch the app directly with node app

Here's my Procfile:

web: bin/web

And bin/web:

#!/bin/sh                                                                       
echo "NODE_ENV=" $NODE_ENV
if [ "$NODE_ENV" == "production" ]; then
    echo "Starting the server with node app"
    node app
else
    echo "Starting the server using grunt"
    grunt
fi

The first echo is for debugging. heroku log is showing:

app[web.1]: NODE_ENV=

Basically, meaning NODE_ENV is not set. (and the app starts with grunt instead of node app)

The docs say that "The NODE_ENV environment variable defaults to production, but you can override it if you wish"

What am I missing?

Chris Harrington · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-26 19:19:03Z

43

Not sure if you figured this out or not, but I had the same problem and fixed it using:

heroku config:set NODE_ENV=production

Via https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/nodejs-support.

Good luck!

answered Mar 26, 2014 at 19:19

Chris Harrington

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2 Comments

Sean Dunford Over a year ago

Did you put this in your procfile?

Sean Dunford Over a year ago

I'm an idiot this something you run in command line it just looks similar to procfile so i was confused.

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