APP_ENV
production
Runtime env (injected by server)
APP_MESSAGE
Hello from Kubernetes runtime env
API_URL
https://api.myapp.com
Visit count for this pod process: 16 (increments on each page load — proves the server is computing, not serving a fixed file).
Static vs dynamic
Browser
→
Ingress
→
Node process
→
HTML built now
Static site: nginx returns the same index.html every time. Dynamic site: Node reads process.env and builds HTML/JSON per request.