The Node.js Production Readiness Checklist: 47 Things Engineers Miss Before Shipping

The Node.js Production Readiness Checklist: 47 Things Engineers Miss Before Shipping There's a chasm between "it works on my machine" and "it works in production." Most teams discover this chasm by falling into it. The Node.js runtime is forgiving during development and unforgiving in production. Missing environment variables don't crash your dev server the way they crash your container. Unhandled promise rejections don't take down your laptop. A memory leak that runs for a few minutes during local testing doesn't surface until it's been running for six hours under real traffic and your on-call engineer gets paged at 2 AM. This checklist exists to close that gap before you ship — not after. These aren't beginner tips. If you're still learning how async/await works, start elsewhere. This is for engineers preparing real applications for real production environments. The items below are drawn from the categories that generate the most incidents: environment configuration mistakes, silent