Heroku NODE_ENV environment variable not being set properly

Question

I have a couple of apps running on Heroku and it would seem NODE_ENV is always set to production , even though I have it manually set to development in the environment variables on heroku.

When deploying, I see this in the logs:

-----> Creating runtime environment

       NPM_CONFIG_LOGLEVEL=error
       NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION=false
       NODE_ENV=development
       NODE_MODULES_CACHE=true
       NODE_VERBOSE=false

So it would look like NODE_ENV is being set appropriately, however the app behaves as if it were set to production .

Is it possible to override NODE_ENV on heroku?

Thanks.

EDIT:

Here's the code I'm using.

let AUTH_URL = 'https://development.com';

if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development') {
    AUTH_URL = 'https://development.com'
} else if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'staging') {
    AUTH_URL = 'https://staging.com'
} else if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
    AUTH_URL = 'https://production.com'
}

export {
    AUTH_URL
}

AUTH_URL is then used in other scripts as the base URL to make API calls to. I have NODE_ENV environment variable set to development, but the URL being set is always https://production.com no matter the value of NODE_ENV on heroku. Here's a screenshot of the environment variables set up on heroku

Answer 1

Check package.json for start script. If it has something similar to below it might be overwriting it.

package.json

{
...
"scripts": {
    ...
    "start": "cross-env NODE_ENV=production node ./server/index.js"
  },
...
}

So convert it to

{
...
"scripts": {
    ...
    "start": "node ./server/index.js"
  },
...
}