In Railway, my NODE_ENV is properly set to 'production' however when utilizing the variable in a string comparison, it fails, despite being the same.

I've used single quotes, double quotes, and no quotes.
I've used ==, as well as ===.

No dice.

Could you provide a reproducible example code? I fear that if I tried to reproduce it I would not face this issue.

If you whip up an ExpressJS app, you can use this as the app.js and it should reproduce well enough:

const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const basicAuth = require('express-basic-auth');
const cors = require('cors');
const dotenv = require('dotenv');
dotenv.config({ path: './.env' });

const app = express();

app.use(cors());

app.use(
  bodyParser.json({
    verify: (req, _, buf) => {
      req.rawBody = buf;
    },
  }),
);


app.use(
  ['/admin/*'],
  basicAuth({
    users: {
      [process.env.ADMIN_USERNAME]: process.env.ADMIN_PASSWORD,
    },
    challenge: true,
    realm: 'Protected Area',
  }),
);

// Start the server
const port = process.env.PORT || 3456;
app.listen(port, '0.0.0.0', () => {
  console.log(`API server running on port ${port}`);
});

console.log('Node ENV: ', process.env.NODE_ENV.trim());
console.log(
  'Result: ',
  process.env.NODE_ENV.trim() === 'production'
    ? 'awaiting_shipment'
    : 'cancelled',
);

console.log(
  "Node ENV == 'production': ",
  process.env.NODE_ENV.trim() == 'production',
);

Okay I'll give that a try.

Thanks for all the support brody. Let me know how it goes.

Sorry for the late reply, had a bunch of stuff to do around the house today, but unfortunately, I was not able to reproduce this issue -

> node_test@1.0.0 start
> node app.js
Node ENV:  production
Result:  awaiting_shipment
Node ENV == 'production':  true
API server running on port 5807

Hmm, fascinating. I'm kinda fascinated by this, going to keep triaging. This is my Dockerfile, if anything immediately stands out:

# Use the official Node.js image as the base
FROM node:18

# Set the working directory
WORKDIR /service

RUN npm install -g pm2

# Copy package.json and package-lock.json
COPY package*.json ./

# Install dependencies
RUN yarn install

# Copy the rest of the application code
COPY . .

# Expose the API port
EXPOSE 3456

# Copy the Prisma schema
COPY prisma ./prisma/

# Generate Prisma client
RUN npx prisma generate

# Start the API server
CMD ["pm2-runtime", "start", "npm", "--", "start"]

Not that I think it's causing your issue, I would personally never use pm2 in a production environment such as Railway, it provides an unnecessary overhead when Railway is already set to restart the deployment if it crashes with a non-zero code.

But I will try this Dockerfile with pm2 (but without prisma) and the app.js you gave me earlier.

Thank you Brody; that's a hold-over from a recent dev deployment to Fly.io; I needed a little extra visibility into my active Node app, but I no longer have an immediate need for it, I'll go ahead and remove that.

I actually just solved the issue by changing NODEENV to APPENV. I did not change the value, and the console log output is no different, so that's quite strange. None the less, I'm all fixed up.

Thanks for your support, again!

That's very odd, but I'm glad you where able figure it out!