Configuring a mobile app to connect to user-hosted servers?

mobile
1

I’m developing a project with Meteor where users install their own server instances locally. How do I set up the mobile apps so they’ll ask for a server URL on startup instead of using some default?

Rocket.Chat did this with their mobile apps before they created native ones, but after digging through the code for a while I still haven’t been able to figure out how they did it.

2

Here’s a quick example of subscribing to a collection from another server (try it in the console from your app)

var connection = DDP.connect('https://www.meteor.com')
var partners = new Mongo.Collection('partners', {connection:connection})
connection.subscribe('partners')
setTimeout(()=>{
  console.log(partners.find().fetch())
},3000)

You can also use new AccountsClient({connection:connection}) docs to get accounts working with other servers.

2 Likes
3

Thanks, that should work for connecting to other servers. But doesn’t Meteor auto-connect to a default app server on startup? Would setting the server to, say, http://example.com cause a problem for the app? The app users will sometimes have no internet connection, only the local network.

4

There shouldn’t be any problem if Meteor fails to connect to the default server I think.

Btw, It’d be nice if you could change the default connection at runtime, It’s something I’ve wanted, but it seems pretty tricky :thinking:

1 Like