How to set environment variable in EC2 Instance for a node app

Question

I'm currently running a node application on an EC2 Instance Linux using PM2 to manage and it keeps crashing, throwing an error that reads Username is required .

This username is being fed from process.env.USERNAME that I set using dotenv for development.

So far using AWS shell I have tried to pass the env variable in the following paths:

/etc/profile
/etc/bashrc
/etc/profile.d
~/.bash_profile
~/.bashrc

The variables were put in this form: export VARIABLE_KEY=VALUE

I also tried to put the variables inside /etc/environment . None of which is making it work.

I restarted the server each time, logged out, and logged back in.

Answer 1

The way I solved it was to restart pm2 using pm2 restart --update-env . When you first run pm2 start , it caches the env variables, so I needed to restart it to add the newly created env variables.