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mongodbmeteormobiledatabase-connectionapk
lucasmonteiro001
lucasmonteiro001

Reputation: 83

Use external mongodb in mobile build of Meteor

I've seen in a lot of places that in order to use an External Mongodb in Meteor applications, you should use an Environment Variable MONGO_URL. However, I'm building my application to work both as web app and mobile app (by generating an apk).

The problem is that when I start meteor as MONGO_URL='mongodb://user:[email protected]:9999/db' meteor it works well in my computer. But, it's not possible (I haven't found any way of doing so yet) to do this in mobile.

So, anyone has any idea of how I could use an external mongodb in mobile applications?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 574

Answers (2)

ghybs
ghybs

Reputation: 53215

It seems to me that you are confused about how Meteor works, and more generally the client-server architecture.

Only your server has access to your database (whether on the same machine or at a third party provider), so that you keep control of exactly what your Client has access to.

By "Client", we mean what your visitor uses to access your app, whether a web app through a browser, or a mobile app through a Cordova wrapper.

So your mobile app only needs to know the URL of the server it has to connect to. That is specified by the --server option when you do your meteor build.

Then your server needs to know how to access the external MongoDB. This is your MONGO_URL environment variable. In production, you would set this variable on your server host. Each provider offers a different method to configure those environment variables, most of the time there is a graphical administration panel.

Note that the way Meteor works, you can use the same server to support both your web app and mobile app at the same time.

Finally, you can also test on mobile using meteor run android instead of just meteor (or with ios instead of Android, but you need a Mac). Of course you can still specify your MONGO_URL variable in the CLI when testing, exactly like you have done when testing on browser.

Upvotes: 1

Nate
Nate

Reputation: 1875

For mobile (cordova) meteor applications think of the app as just a web view with the ability to access native device features (camera, bluetooth ...). Since the application is basically a web view, the underlying mongodb associated with it is the same. If you want mobile device specific storage take a look at GroundDB

For your situation, if sounds like your mobile app is having problems connecting to your server, ultimately not allowing it to pull data from the mongoDB. Make sure that when you build the mobile application you have server specifed '--mobile-server'. Also if you are running it locally, make sure your mobile device is on the same network as your computer and any firewalls that might not allow connections are disabled.

Upvotes: 0

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