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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T04:30:44+00:00

I have an Upstart script for my server that looks like this: description myapp

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I have an Upstart script for my server that looks like this:

description "myapp node.js server"

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown

env NODE_ENV=production
env CUSTOM=somevalue
exec sudo -u nodejs /usr/local/bin/node /opt/myapp/app.js >> /var/log/nodejs/myapp.log 2>&1

post-start script
    NODE_PID=`status myapp | egrep -oi '([0-9]+)$' | head -n1` 
    echo $NODE_PID > /var/run/nodejs/myapp.pid
end script

However, the app doesn’t see NODE_ENV set to production. In fact, if I console.log(process.env) within the app, I don’t see NODE_ENV or CUSTOM. Any ideas what’s happening?

By the way, NODE_ENV=production node app.js works just fine.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    From the sudo man page (Ubuntu version of sudo)

    There are two distinct ways to deal with environment variables. By default, the env_reset sudoers
    option is enabled. This causes commands to be executed with a minimal environment containing TERM,
    PATH, HOME, SHELL, LOGNAME, USER and USERNAME in addition to variables from the invoking process
    permitted by the env_check and env_keep sudoers options. There is effectively a whitelist for
    environment variables.

    Sudo is resetting the environment. This is a frustrating aspect of using su and sudo in upstart or init scripts. Recent versions of upstart support specifying uid/gid without the use of sudo via the setuid/setgid directives as in the example below. Also note the use of chdir.

    start on filesystem and started networking
respawn
chdir /var/www/yourapp
setuid yourapp
setgid yourapp
env NODE_ENV=production
env PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
env CUSTOM=somevalue
exec /usr/local/bin/node app.js | /usr/bin/multilog s1024000 /var/log/yourapp 2>&1

    For older versions of upstart, here’s what I used to do to work around it.

    description "start and stop the example.com node.js server"

start on filesystem and started networking
respawn

chdir /path/to/your/code
exec su -c 'PATH=$PWD/node/bin NODE_ENV=$(cat node_env.txt) ./node/bin/node app/server.js' www-data  >> tmp/stdout.log 2>&1

    Note that I just put a node_env.txt file in my app root that sets production mode, because I hate environment variables. You can just do NODE_ENV=production right there if you prefer.

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