Starting or Building Keystone with NODE_ENV set production fails.

[chukwumaijem]

Please add steps to reproduce the problem

• Scaffold a new Keystonejs app.
• Install dotenv or a similar tool
• inside keysone.ts file, import dotenv import 'dotenv/config';
• set NODE_ENV=production in .env file
• Try building the project.

Please describe what you expected to happen

It should build successfully. It builds in development, testing, and staging. It builds even when NODE_ENV is undefined. But only fails in production mode.

Please add any screenshots if possible

Please add contextual information such as your node version (node -v), or the web browser you used

Tried on NODE v16, v18, and v20 (using nvm).

[chukwumaijem]

I just downgraded to "@keystone-6/core": "^4.0.1", then "@keystone-6/core": "3.1.3" and got the exact same behavior.

[cyanonoob]

Had the same, removed node_env from my .env and building was fine. Cryptical, and is manually setting node_env really that evil?

[chukwumaijem]

Had the same, removed node_env from my .env and building was fine. Cryptical, and is manually setting node_env really that evil?

If you set it to any value other than production. it will build successfully. But why is setting it to production a problem?

[dcousens]

Cannot reproduce this, and you should always have NODE_ENV=production if you aren't locally developing the project, @chukwumaijem please provide more information

[chukwumaijem]

The only other information missing from what I already provided is that I'm working on Ubuntu 22.04. I can make a loom showing everything I did step by step.

Noticed this because it failed during image build on the CI with NODE_ENV=production, tried the same env locally and got the same error.

[chukwumaijem]

@dcousens

https://www.loom.com/share/e2cde6876a304255ba311dc1a357fed7?sid=0f20ed38-676e-4e83-8b31-ce47c7553295

[marekryb]

@dcousens I checked this and I can reproduce it. The key is to import dotenv before importing schema (otherwise error does not happen) and having NODE_ENV=production in .env
Funnily enough if you use NODE_ENV=production yarn keystone build then it works fine (with and without dotenv). Also any other env loaded by dotenv seem to work just fine.
Which leads me to believe this is somehow related to esbuild special treatment of NODE_ENV as per GHSA-25mx-2mxm-6343

@chukwumaijem if this is blocker for you (you use NODE_ENV checks for some other code), try adding NODE_ENV in the package.json script commands - "build": "NODE_ENV=production keystone build", "dev": "NODE_ENV=development keystone dev" etc.

[chukwumaijem]

Thank you @marekryb. It builds successfully when I set NODE_ENV in the build script.

[dcousens]

The key is to import dotenv before importing schema (otherwise error does not happen) and having NODE_ENV=production in .env

This aligns with the dotenv documentation

As early as possible in your application, import and configure dotenv

[chukwumaijem]

That's exactly what I was doing. See the screenshot attached. Or the loom. But it was causing an error.

[dcousens]

Interesting, I think we should keep this open

[ttbarnes]

I'm getting the same issue - created an issue before I found this one