Atmosphere is stale, recent versions or data missing

Reproduce:

  1. go to The trusted source for JavaScript packages, Meteor.js resources and tools | Atmosphere

  2. Notice the latest version is 1.0.9

  1. run meteor add zodern:types in an app, notice it will install 1.0.13. You’ll see zodern:types@1.0.13 in .meteor/versions

  2. Look at updates in Atmosphere sidebar, and you’ll notice the flags are empty:

Btw, is the homepage at meteor.com supposed link to packosphere instead of atomosphere? I realized Packosphere (after stumbling on it again accidentally just now) is up-to-date.

But people who are new to Meteor visiting meteor.com will not know about it. This button links to Atmosphere:

Packosphere is a community project and not an official Meteor package explorer. I created it as an open source version of atmosphere that could be updated and built upon since Atmosphere was never open sourced.

4 Likes

Update: Atmosphere is back in sync :tada:

Thanks everyone for flagging this. We dug into the full pipeline (stats-collector → activity-aggregator → S3 → worker → MongoDB → atmospherejs.com) and found multiple issues that had compounded over time.

What was broken

The score/milestone cron had been silently failing since January 2024 because the check(doc, SchemaInstance) pattern is incompatible with aldeed:simple-schema@2.0.0. Every write was being rejected, but the errors were swallowed by a try/catch one level up, so cron runs looked successful in cronHistory while creating zero new scores.

On top of that:

  • The worker wasn’t actually starting its crons (SyncedCron.start() was missing).
  • The webapp on Galaxy was 2 months behind main — last deploy was v135 in April.
  • The aggregator (package-stats) had a row-by-row migration that never completed and a cron that stopped rescheduling itself after errors.

Let me know if some new bug appear, this kind of report is pretty useful.

6 Likes

Ah yep. “Bandaids” are what those are called. An anti pattern! Swallowing up errors makes debugging difficult, and hides real issues until it is too late.

Glad that’s resolved!

I love that Packosphere is open source. The UI is slick, I enjoy it more than Atmosphere. The search feature in Atmosphere is a bit clunky. Meteor team, would you consider adopting Packosphere (and keeping it open source)?

Thanks for documenting the specific version mismatch. It really helps narrow down where the sync pipeline is lagging when there’s a clear discrepancy between the CLI and the Atmosphere UI.

1 Like