Process

The process object holds information about the current running process.

If we open up our process object, we will find a slew of useful information in it, notably our environment variables, and passed in parameters.

Creating a config module

Most applications will require configuration options, things like database connection strings and log level. We likely want to change these values depending on whether we are running in a production or development environment.

env = process.env.NODE_ENV || "development";

var config = {
  development: {
    port: 3000,
    db: "mongodb://localhost/mydb",
    prettyHtml: true,
  },

  production: {
    port: process.env.PORT || 5000,
    db: "mongodb://mongolab.com/mydb",
    prettyHtml: false,
  },
};

module.exports = config[env];

Now we can simply require(‘config’) wherever we need it, and we’ll get back a configuration object that’s specific to our environment.

Exercise - Investigate the process object

Open up a node console. Now grab the process object and have a glance through. Useful.

Process.argv

The process.argv object contains the current path of the file, and values passed in from the command line.

console.log(process.argv);

If we call the program like this:

  node demo.js hello goodbye

=code(code, :bash)

We will get something like this:

["node", "/path/to/file/process.js", "hello", "goodbye"];

Exercise - Configure your node app

Create a configuration object for your Node server