default --mode option to NODE_ENV

[cdekok]

What problem does this feature solve?

Simplify build environments

What does the proposed API look like?

Currently if I want to run a test build I have to do vue-cli-service build --mode=test if It would respect the NODE_ENV I could run it as NODE_ENV=development vue-cli-service build or NODE_ENV=development yarn build

[LinusBorg]

But you can do that... Granted I may be missing something from your one sentence of information and lack of example, but ... you can set NODE_ENV like that today and it will be respected.

[cdekok]

No it doesn't seem to work like that for example see this: https://github.com/cdekok/vue-env
When you run ./node_modules/.bin/vue-cli-service serve --mode=test You will get a console statement with the output of test but if you would run NODE_ENV=test yarn serve the output is undefined.

[LinusBorg]

where in that repo did you add the console log? there's only one big init commit.

Sidenote: I wonder why you run serve in test mode as that mode is designed for unit tests, not the dev server environment.

[cdekok]

Sorry I forgot to push the commit it's now on:
https://github.com/cdekok/vue-env/blob/master/src/main.ts#L8
https://github.com/cdekok/vue-env/blob/master/.env.test#L1
The test environment is quite common I guess, when you have a dev, test, acceptance, production environment.
But either way even under a different name the result is the same.

[LinusBorg]

Oh, now I gt it. you want to set the actual mode depending on th NODE_ENV value. I didn't understand that, the example made it clear for me.

That's not how this is intended to work. As explained in the documentation, we have three main modes, that map to a NODE_ENV of the same name:

• development: for the development server (i.e. with hot module reloading)
• production: for a production-style build (i.e. with minification)
• test: webpack config for unit tests with mocha-webpack

We however allow for users to define their own modes that implement variants of the above. For that, you have to define an env file with that mode's name, and each custom mode has to define one of the three main NODE_ENV values so Vue CLI knows in which main mode this custom mode is intended to run.

So from that i think it becomes clear that we can't have the NODE_ENV define the mode as

1. the mode is more than just NODE_ENV
2. You can't have NODE_ENV values like staging or acceptance because we always have to use NODE_ENV to define the underlying main mode for each custom mode.