As is known, meteor is quite difficult to install in China right now because of our ‘interesting’ GFW. Even though I guess meteor may cooperate with some Chinese famous companies to provide Chinese CDN.
Yes meteor.com is not blocked, so is install.meteor.com. The problem is that cloudfront.net is quite unstable. Sometimes we can access it very slow(perhaps cost a whole night for download), sometimes the connection fails frequently. The install cmd is curl --progress-bar --fail "$TARBALL_URL" | tar -xzf - -C "$INSTALL_TMPDIR" -o，if the connection failed often, we couldn’t successfully download it because the cmd missed -C to resume download.
Besides that, in the install shell, the old .meteor is removed before installing the new version. However, in China, the old version is removed easily(without http connection) while the new one may not be successfully downloaded forever in the very pity night. I think meteor could set the .meteor as a symbol link to the current version(say .meteor-1.3), thus if the download failed, the .meteor still linked to the old one.
Of course if we could access cloudfront.net rapidly, the solutions above were not necessary at all. It’s cloudfront’s duty to provide a relatively available download speed in the worldwide. But nowadays it still doesn’t work so well in some areas, not to mention some countries with a Big Brother.
@wulfric Is the issue that the connection from China is slow, or that install.meteor.com is blocked? If it’s just slow, are there any fast providers that could host the current build for free inside China?
Yes meteor.com is not blocked, so is install.meteor.com. The problem is that cloudfront.net is quite unstable. Sometimes we can access it very slow(perhaps cost a whole night for download), sometimes the connection fails frequently. The install cmd is curl --progress-bar --fail "$TARBALL_URL" | tar -xzf - -C "$INSTALL_TMPDIR" -o，if the connection failed often, we couldn’t successfully download it because the cmd missed -C to resume download.
Besides that, in the install shell, the old .meteor is removed before installing the new version. However, in China, the old version is removed easily(without http connection) while the new one may not be successfully downloaded forever in the very pity night. I think meteor could set the .meteor as a symbol link to the current version(say .meteor-1.3), thus if the download failed, the .meteor still linked to the old one.
Of course if we could access cloudfront.net rapidly, the solutions above were not necessary at all. It’s cloudfront’s duty to provide a relatively available download speed in the worldwide. But nowadays it still doesn’t work so well in some areas, not to mention some countries with a Big Brother.
Has anyone had any success in getting decent download speeds for new versions of Meteor in China?
Every time I meteor update in China, that’s a 3-4 hour wait.
Also, is there any other way to install a new version of Meteor, not using the curl command? It would be nice if I could just do the three hour wait once and then use that downloaded version to update several servers without having to do the loooong download every time.
Sorry, I don’t know why I assumed Windows. The process is pretty much the same for macOS/linux. To see the exact steps, go to https://install.meteor.com/. You’ll see the source for the install shell script. Look in that script for the first occurrence of TARBALL_URL, and you’ll see essentially the same process being followed (download the tarball for the proper platform, extract it into $HOME/.meteor, create a launcher script in your path so meteor can be found, etc.).
