ext4-rs | Read files directly from ext4 filesystem images | File Utils library

This can happen due to multiple reason. Please check if the app itself is running any demon from within. What do you see when you run ps aux || grep node. If you can post your app.js or server.js or index.js or anything which acts as main file of your application file here that would help to diagnose the issue.

if you are setting any environment variable like production you can do it explicitly i.e export NODE_ENV=production

You can start the server.js app without npm with pm2 with below command pm2 start server.js -- --prod This should work without any problem.

For anything more than this i would recommend the pm2 config file this is the right way of using pm2 scripts.