Express Integration

Pug fully integrates with Express, a popular Node.js web framework, as a supported view engine. Check out Express’s excellent guide for how to integrate Pug with Express.

Production Defaults ¶

In Express, the environmental variable NODE_ENV is designed to inform the web application of the execution environment: whether it is in development or in production. Express and Pug automatically modify the defaults of a few options in production environment, to provide a better out-of-the-box experience for users.

Specifically, when process.env.NODE_ENV is set to 'production', and Pug is used with Express, the compileDebug option is false by default, while the cache option is true.

To override the defaults for compileDebug and cache, you can set the respective property in app.locals or res.locals objects to true or false. The cache option can also be overriden through Express’s app.disable/enable('view cache').

For more details, check Express’s API reference.