Sai Chimata sai-chai

## nodeenvDiscussion.md

      
        
          
            
              
              1 file
            
          
          
            
              
              1 fork
            
          
          
            
              
              2 comments
            
          
          
            
              
              33 stars
            
          
        
        
          
              
          
          
            
                markerikson
                / nodeenvDiscussion.md
            
            
              Last active
              January 9, 2023 15:24
            
              
                Summary of process.env.NODE_ENV and its use with Webpack
              
          
        
      
        
  
      
    [02:06 PM] acemarke: @Steven : a couple other thoughts on the whole NODE_ENV thing.  First, per my comments, it really is a Node concept.  It's a system environment variable that Node exposes to your application, and apparently the Express web server library popularized using its value to determine whether to do optimizations or not

[02:08 PM] acemarke: Second, because of its use within the Node ecosystem, web-focused libraries also started using it to determine whether to they were being run in a "development" environment vs a "production" environment, with corresponding optimizations.  For example, React uses that as the equivalent of a C #ifdef to act as conditional checking for debug logging and perf tracking.  If process.env.NODE_ENV is set to "production", all those if clauses will evaluate to false.

Third, in conjunction with a tool like UglifyJS that does minification and removal of dead code blocks, a clause that is surrounded with if(process.env.NODE_ENV !== "development")