Cordova app (Android) not reloading after hot code push with deployed app

martijnwalraven · January 13, 2016, 2:27pm

I’m not familiar with the scalingo setup, but it seems they use demeteorizer. Could it be that they somehow do not build the web.cordova architecture?

soulou · January 13, 2016, 3:00pm

Hi @blouze, hi @martijnwalraven

I’m Scalingo’s CTO,maybe I’ll be able to give you a little more insight about our build process. Currently, we do not build to the ‘android’ and ‘ios’ targets. Once built, the programs directory looks like the following:

bundle/programs $ ls
server	web.browser

It makes no sens for us to build the ios and android targets as we’re only hosting the web part of the application. Does the ‘server’ target needs the ‘android’ target to be enabled to allow hot code push?

Regards,

– Leo

martijnwalraven · January 13, 2016, 3:13pm

Hi @soulou, thanks for looking into this. The server target indeed needs to build the web.cordova architecture to be able to serve updated code to mobile clients.

I’m not sure about your workflow, but the easiest solution is probably to leave the ios and/or android targets in as part of the projects and use meteor build as usual.

If you want to dive in more into what is going on, see:

github.com

meteor/meteor/blob/devel/tools/project-context.js#L1133-L1140


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soulou · January 13, 2016, 3:37pm

Actually, letting ios and android does not work for us, building the ios target requires a Mac OS environment to build this target and building the ‘android’ target requires a full Android SDK which is not available in our nodejs/meteor building environment.

For us the ideal solution would be to build the web.cordova architecture without building the full android application. (it has no sense for us to build an Android application on our web hosting platform )

Have you any idea of the feasability of this?

Thanks !

martijnwalraven · January 13, 2016, 3:56pm

Hmmm, I’m not sure what the best way to deal with this would be. I’ll ask around and get back to you!

blouze · January 20, 2016, 12:23pm

Hey @martijnwalraven.

I was wondering if you had some new information on the requirements for building for the web.cordova architecture without the hassle of hosting SDKs and system environments.

Cheers.

martijnwalraven · January 20, 2016, 2:20pm

We’ve been talking about it internally, and we agree we need to find a solution for this. One option we discussed would be to allow adding a cordova-server-only platform. Another option might be to add a --server-only option to meteor build.

martijnwalraven · March 2, 2016, 9:20am

@blouze @soulou: In 1.3-beta.12, I’ve added a --server-only option to meteor build that doesn’t require the mobile SDKs to be installed on the build machine, but that will still build web.cordova when ios or android platforms have been added to the project.

soulou · March 2, 2016, 9:51am

Hi @martijnwalraven

Great, thanks for adding this to the build chain, it will be very useful for us

blouze · April 3, 2016, 3:32pm

Hey @martijnwalraven!
As a meteor-head, I want to thank you all at MDG for your hard work to bring us 1.3

I just upgraded my mobile app to find out if it would solve my previous problem.

I am able to get the HCP working with a published Cordova app built with --server option set on a locally running instance (I had to build the app first, and then run meteor with a target specified as pointed out here).

After deploying the app in production, I can see the same behaviour as before, web client gets refreshed, no cigar for Cordova.

Values for ROOT_URL is set alright in runtime config, I even get a value for autoupdateVersionCordova.

Pls, halp.

martijnwalraven · April 3, 2016, 3:46pm

Are both the app and your server on Meteor 1.3?

Can you check if the asset manifest is served at /__cordova/manifest.json on your production server?

Any error messages either in logcat or with Chrome remote debugging?

blouze · April 4, 2016, 10:01am

I forgot to mention __cordova/manifest.json gets served.

BUT, opening logcat (thx for the tip) got me:

Error: Skipping downloading new version because the Cordova platform version or plugin versions have changed and are potentially incompatible

cordova --version gives 6.1.0

Trying to update incriminated plugins… Getting back at you after that.

blouze · April 13, 2016, 2:50pm

Nope, still no luck with my issue

I tried removing every single cordova plugins (including crosswalk), I still get the same error.

martijnwalraven · April 13, 2016, 3:47pm

The issue is that hot code push can only update JavaScript code, so to protect against situations where updated code depends on (versions of) plugins that are not in the native app bundle, we block hot code push when either the platform version or the set of plugins have changed.

You may have installed or updated plugins yourself, but Meteor 1.3.1 also updates some plugins included by default. So if your server is running Meteor 1.3.1 and your app was build using Meteor 1.3, hot code push will be blocked until you update the app on the app store.

skirunman · April 13, 2016, 3:52pm

Is this the case, that hot code will be blocked for every minor update to Meteor, if the app and server are not running the same version?

This will be a huge problem for us. I can see the need to do this between 1.2 and 1.3 as it was a major update to mobile with lots of breaking changes. However, this is will be untenable for us if we have to re-submit to app store for every minor bug fix release of Meteor. I can potentially see the need to block hot code push if cordova plugin versions change, but not for Meteor IOS/Android versions.

Please clarify, thanks.

martijnwalraven · April 13, 2016, 4:05pm

It is not about the version of Meteor per se, so this shouldn’t happen for every minor update. But we did update some of the versions of default plugins in Meteor 1.3.1, so that is what triggered this.

blouze · April 13, 2016, 4:09pm

I updated my project to 1.3.1 today and I can see in __meteor_runtime_config__ that this is what’s running in production…

skirunman · April 13, 2016, 4:37pm

Unless absolutely required because of a major blocking bug in any of the default plugins bundled with Meteor I’d like to suggest that we NOT update these plugins between minor (x.x.x) releases and save these changes for major releases (x.x.0) going forward.

In addition, this should be documented in the release notes and history as this type of change is really a “breaking change” for any deployed mobile app.

Thanks again for all your hard work and great improvements with Meteor mobile.

nerdmed · April 15, 2016, 10:59am

@martijnwalraven i have a very similar issue while developing locally. The manifest file seems to not be served when i start the server with a simple

meteor run --settings “config/settings-local.json” --mobile-server “localIp:3000”

as soon as i run with ‘meteor run android-device’ the manifest file is served. But sometimes i want to just start the app via android studio to test some stuff. This was different some time ago and it think it makes sense to include server the manifest whenever there is a mobile-server flag and/or there are ios and android as platforms included.

http://MY.LOCAL.IP:3000/__cordova/manifest.json

Is there a special flag we could use to fix this while developing right now?

martijnwalraven · April 15, 2016, 11:05am

@nerdmed: This was actually a deliberate change made as a result of this issue, because people wanted the ability to run the app in the browser without building the Cordova bundle. A few people have noted they preferred the previous behavior, so maybe we need to somehow make this configurable.