What's the purpose of setting NODE_ENV on Openshift

Question

After installing ghost on Openshift why is it required to type these commands ?

rhc set-env NODE_ENV=production --app $appname
rhc app restart $appname

Answer 1

If you look at Ghost's skeleton config.js module, you will notice there are several discreet sections, such as development, test, production, that specify the settings for each runtime environment.

By default, most Node.js applications will run in development mode unless NODE_ENV is explicitly configured otherwise. Since Ghost is a Node.js application, it too respects NODE_ENV in order to configure runtime settings.

You should definitely not be running your Ghost server in production with the default development runtime environment.