What does the ELIFECYCLE Node.js error mean?

It's basically saying it fails to spawn your process not due to permission but to an error in your script. Source

You don't have any problem executing NODE_ENV=production node app.js ?

One might think this is because outdated versions of npm and node, but it's not the case.

Just as Pierre Inglebert says, if you look into the source you can see that End of lifecycle means the program unexpectedly stopped. This can have various reasons. So it's not a syntax error and not an expected exception/error.

The error appeared to me when a different tool was already using the http port (3000) defined in my node scripts. When you run your node app on port 80, make sure you have stopped Apache webserver (as an example).

In my case, it was because of low RAM memory, when a photo compression library was unable to process bigger photos.