Lessons learned 1st half year - support meteorjs on yet unsupported ARM architecture

announce
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meteorjs is running on ARM like UDOO, Raspberry Pi and others smoothly.

We figured out a number of issues but all could be solved. No really heavy topics. The most stressfull part is always waiting for the compiler to get finshed on boards like Raspi.

Top 3 of issues

  1. wrong version of nodejs
  2. outdated gcc for building nodejs
  3. errors on non-core packages like npm-crypt

Solutions

  1. Build and install up-to-date NodeJS
  2. Check for infos about updating gcc
  3. Use non-core packages for your meteor apps

Please read complete post here and more infos at tumblr blog.

Tom

Discussions at :

  1. GitHub issues queue meteor universal fork
  2. Issue #442 on meteorjs queue about ARM support
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The problem I ran into was mongo. Node cross compiles easily to ARM (at least with the buildroot tool chain it’s easy enough), but mongo was another story. I may give it another go soon enough. Meteor on tiny devices seems neat, but…why? DDP from a tiny device seems adequate for an IoT application (at least in mine), but even then MQTT is a better and more dynamic option for routing data around. A MQTT–>DDP bridge is easy to roll, in a IoT gateway application where you may be edge processing and aggregating tiny device data to ship out toward the Internet at large. Kinda a fog-of-things/motes use case. For a native webserver based interface I prefer a lightweight express app or something like Sails.js (which actually works very well in that use case in my experience)

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Hi @jasoncchild

I also would not use the Meteor ARM fork on any IoT device, it depends on size and power and your vision. As you could read on this forum entry:

there are some really great devices which can handle the meteor server pretty well. This allows to write good embedded software running as “to go” solutions. As you could find in my profile we build some yachting device with apps based on meteor and those devices.

We started with sails and some others and checked them. But when comparing to meteor (<~1.5yrs) we felt more comfortable with meteor. And so we use it everywhere on such projects and are very happy with that decision. To include really the smallest devices we are also using MQTT or at least just serial communication.

With the mongo installation we did not had any difficulties. Based on the used OSes there was always an installable and suitable package. So we didn’t compile it ourself.

Cheers,
Tom

P.S.: It seems that there is some really interest in running meteor on ARM devices – Our download rate is currently > 2.500

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