Building in production: The .env is not copied into the build folder

[LeCoupa]

It seems that this issue has also been reported on StackOverflow also.

Building with npm run build does not copy the .env file at the root of the project into the build folder.

Thus, the following error appears with node build/server.js

Exception: E_MISSING_ENV_VALUE: Missing environment variable "NODE_ENV"

I am using "@adonisjs/core": "5.0.4-preview-rc-2"

[thetutlage]

This is intentional since you are not supposed to use your development .env file in production.

• There are some values that needs to be changed. For example: DB_HOST, DB_NAME, DB_PASSWORD and so on
• The APP_KEY should be strictly different in prod and development.

In other words, the .env file is not meant to be portable and hence there is no point in copying it to the build folder

[LeCoupa]

I think there is something I am missing. This is not my .env file for development but for production as I build Adonis on my remote server.

git fetch --all
npm install
npm run build
pm2 start build/server.js --name API

This means that now, I have to run this command cp .env build/.env before starting the process or it will not work.

[thetutlage]

This means that now, I have to run this command cp .env build/.env before starting the process or it will not work

Yes, you have to. There is no standard way of defining environment variables.

• You decided to do it via .env file inside the project root in your production server.
• One using Heroku or AWS will define them using their management console's.
• One using DO apps will define them using the app spec file.

In any ways, the step of providing environment variables in prod has to be explicit. I know earlier (before the recent release), we used to copy the .env file. But this can lead to false positive behaviour too

[LeCoupa]

Thank you @thetutlage. By the way, I have a few hours tomorrow to work on the documentation regarding deployment. Where can I find the repository?

EDIT: Just found it https://github.com/adonisjs/adonisjs.com/