CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptrepositorymeteor
Andrew Mao
Andrew Mao

Reputation: 36930

How to symlink Javascript projects repos into a Meteor app

Meteor has a great file loading policy for general development. It automatically loads files from the app directory with some special treatment for public, private, client and server directories. (See http://docs.meteor.com/#structuringyourapp)

When loading third-party Javascript libraries into a Meteor app, I usually put them in a <head> script or directly in the client/compatibility directory, which works well for released files.

However, sometimes I need to link a developing version of a project directly from a GitHub repository from a certain branch, when testing patches or pull requests. I already do this all the time for Meteor smart packages which are picked up transparently. However, I'm not sure how to do this for general (client-side) Javascript libraries. Moreover, it's the linking in of a repo rather than a listed version that is tricky. Can someone who has had to do this give suggestions?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 811

Answers (1)

Andrew Mao
Andrew Mao

Reputation: 36930

One approach to this was briefly described in https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/1229.

I found that this can be cleanly implemented as a resident smart package in your app. This approach works well in Meteor 0.6.5 and any future versions until this API changes. First create the following in package.js:

Package.on_use(function (api) {
    api.use(['routepolicy', 'webapp'], 'server');

    api.add_files('client.html', 'client');    
    api.add_files('server.js', 'server');
});

and in server.js, you declare that you want Meteor to serve up an entire directory (the appropriate part of the repo) as part of the app (in my case, OpenLayers):

connect = Npm.require('connect');

RoutePolicy.declare('/lib', 'network');

WebApp.connectHandlers
  .use(connect.bodyParser())
  .use('/lib', connect.static("/home/mao/projects/openlayers/lib"));

finally, client.html tells your app to load up the code in the right path:

<head>
    <script src="/lib/OpenLayers.js"></script>    
</head>

Assuming the above package was in a directory named openlayers, commenting or uncommenting openlayers in the package file of my app allows me to switch really easily between compiled releases and running from repo for this package.

Upvotes: 1

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