What is a development environment and how to configure it?

Question

I am looking at nodepad: http://dailyjs.com/2010/11/15/node-tutorial-3/

And they have different development, development, production, production environments.

How to configure your server accordingly so that the application finds out in which environment it should be?

Thank.

Answer 1

See express infrastructure documentation :

To change the environment, we can set the environment variable NODE_ENV, for example:
$ NODE_ENV=production node app.js