entity export not serializing node

Question

I am trying to use entity export to move existing entitys from a live to dev site. I tried the code below and it returned

NULL int(1)

However, when I did a dump of the $node object, it did dump the object correctly, so I know that the entity exists

$query = new EntityFieldQuery();
$query
  ->entityCondition('entity_type', 'node')
  ->entityCondition('bundle', 'events')
  ->propertyCondition('status', 1)
  ->propertyOrderBy('created', 'DESC');
$result = $query->execute();  

$nids = array_keys($result['node']);
//var_dump($nids, 1);
$node = node_load($nids[0]);
var_dump($node,1);

//dpm(entity_get_info());
$entity  = entity_export('node', $node);
var_dump($entity,1);

Answer 1

The entity_export function comes with the following caveat:

Note: Currently, this only works for entity types provided with the entity CRUD API.

This means that if your entity type does not come with this, a call to entity_export() will return NULL.

This seems to be the case with node.

I am not sure, but I think the core team never got around to adding CRUD API to core entities.

If you inspect a node entity with dpm(), there is nothing. If you do:

 debug($node->delete, 'node->delete');

it prints NULL.