#Node - Running in Production
This gist is based on the excellent post by @hacksparrow which is found at http://www.hacksparrow.com/running-express-js-in-production-mode.html. The main principle is that you want the application to detect that it is running on a production server and to use the production configuration. The way to do this is to set the NODE_ENV=production. To do this you need to do the following:
$ export NODE_ENV=production
But we have a little problem here. The NODE_ENV environment variable will be lost if the server restarts, so it is safer to put it in the .bash_profile file. That way the variable will set again every time the system reboots. You will find the file in your home directory. It's a hidden file, so you can't see it unless you do a ls -la. We will append the export command to the .bash_profile file.