Adding/Removing Packages while Meteor is Running?

Hi There, I’m just getting started with Meteor and going finishing up David Turnbull’s ‘Your First Meteor Application’. One issue I’ve run into that doesn’t seem to be covered in that very thorough book, is that I can’t seem to add or remove packages from the command line while Meteor is running. I have to shut Meteor down, then add or remove the package and fire it up again. If I try while Meteor is running, nothing happens after I write the command ‘meteor add accounts-ui’ or whatever I’m trying to do. The command line just sits there. I’ve attached a screen shot where I tried to remove the insecure package and then tried updating to see if that would do anything.

Everything works fine if I shut Meteor down and reload after modifying my packages, but because this is not mentioned anywhere in the docs, I feel like something’s up on my end.

Any insight would be great! Thanks.

You should open a new tab or terminal window, and run the commands there.

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Or you could just stay in your text editor, and modify .meteor/packages instead :wink:

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Thanks for the replies fella’s.

@sashko That makes good sense. Simple. I’m used to Windows Command Prompt and haven’t deeply understood that you can have multiple CLI’s open at once. (ya know, I’m a DOS baby)

@goatic Sounds pretty slick! Perhaps I’ll learn how to do that down the road. If you have any resources on how to do that, I’d take a look.

If you open the file, you will notice that each package is on its own line. Just paste the “:” on a new line and save. It is as easy as it sounds. Just try it.

This is really useful for new projects when you want to add a bunch of packages at once.

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To add to this, you can organize it a bit, when you get more packages, and want a nice overview of your dependencies, and what you actually use them for.

This is an example from one of my projects:

#Basic
	meteor-base
	mobile-experience
	mongo
	session
	tracker
	standard-minifiers
	es5-shim
	ecmascript

#User Interface & Experience
	semantic:ui
	flemay:less-autoprefixer
	jquery
	natestrauser:animate-css
	gwendall:ui-hooks
	markdown

#Frontend Framework
	blaze-html-templates
	kadira:blaze-layout


#Authentication & Authorization
	accounts-password
	mizzao:user-status

#Routing
	kadira:flow-router

#Utility
	momentjs:moment
	check
	random
	ejson
	reactive-var
	reactive-dict
	mizzao:timesync

#Security
	force-ssl
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