node dotenv won't work with pm2

Question

I have an application where locally (without pm2) all the environment variables in the .env file work just fine using dotenv.

But on the server where I'm using pm2 to run the app, the environment variables remain undefined.

The pm2 commands I'm using to run the app on server are:

pm2 start myapp/app.js pm2 startup pm2 save 

Answer 1

dotenv will read .env file located in the current directory.

When you call pm2 start myapp/app.js it won't search for myapp/.env.

.env // It will try to load this, which doesn't exist myapp/    app.js 

So you have two solutions

use path option:

const path = require('path');  require('dotenv').config({ path: path.join(__dirname, '.env') }); 

Or call your script from inside myapp/

pm2 start app.js