NodeJS import only if not in production

Question

Basically, I am using morgan to look at logs in developement. I have it under --save-dev. But in my app.js I use const morgan = require('morgan');. It runs fine on my local machine but I only use morgan depending on NODE_ENV. How can I make it that it doesnt raise a module not found exception in production? I will not be using it there so I have it in dev dependencies. Do I have to manually remove that line every time I deploy? Thanks :-)

Answer 1

You can try something like:

if(NODE_ENV !== 'production') {
  const morgan = require('morgan');
  app.use(morgan(...))
}

I just wrote a similar code snippet and ran into no issues.

Answer 2

You can just check the NODE_ENV environment variable in your code via the process.env object Node provides:

if(process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production') const morgan = require('morgan');