npm start not working locally

[paulmiller3000]

I may be missing something obvious, but npm start does not launch my app. Instead, it drops me back to the terminal prompt. My output looks like this:

Miller@Miller-Laptop-P MINGW64 /c/source/my-app (development)
$ npm start

my-app@1.0.0 start C:\source\my-app
per-env

Miller@Miller-Laptop-P MINGW64 /c/source/my-app (development)
$

Here's my package.json:

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "per-env",

    "start:development" : "node -r dotenv/config server.js",
    "start:staging" : "node server.js"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "axios": "^0.19.0",
    "bcryptjs": "^2.4.3",
    "body-parser": "^1.19.0",
    "cors": "^2.8.5",
    "db-migrate": "^0.11.6",
    "db-migrate-pg": "^1.0.0",
    "express": "^4.17.1",
    "knex": "^0.20.4",
    "nodemon": "^2.0.2",
    "per-env": "^1.0.2",
    "pg": "^7.14.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "dotenv": "^8.2.0"
  }
}

I'm running Windows, so just for fun I created a system environment variable named NODE_ENV and set it to "development."

What am I missing?

[siburny]

It turns out spawnSync must be started with shell: true option.

Update: more info here nodejs/node#3675 (comment)

[HitoriSensei]

Since using shell: true has more severe implications that just "making it work", I've used which package to find a location of the npm command