optimise-for-performance.md

Optimise For Performance

Category: Nodejs

You can optimise Nodejs server performance and security in production by using the env NODE_ENV=production environment variable.

Using this setting in Express will cache view templates and CSS files generated from CSS extensions, and will generate less verbose error messages.

If you want to start your server using this setting, use the following command:

NODE_ENV=production node server.js

In a Dockerfile, include the directive ENV NODE_ENV production if you are building production images:

FROM node:lts-alpine@sha256:b2da3316acdc2bec442190a1fe10dc094e7ba4121d029cb32075ff59bb27390a
ENV NODE_ENV production
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY . /usr/src/app
RUN npm ci --only=production
CMD "npm" "start"

Alternatively, set as an environment variable which can be read in by the node process or a container orchestration engine.

On Windows, to set as an environment variable:

SET NODE_ENV=production

On Linux, to set as an environment variable:

export NODE_ENV=production

See Best Practice Performance in Express for more details.