Meteor is not so friendly to Chinese developers now

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.

I pushed a repo https://coding.net/u/wwulfric/p/meteor-install/git/tree/master in coding.net. But coding.net may not afford to provide widely download. It’s better to cooperate with Baidu, Ali, Qiniu or Tencent.

------------------------------------------UPDATE: ------------------------------------------

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?

For what it’s worth.

GFW - Great Fire Wall… of China. Many non Chinese locations are blocked by the government. I’m assuming meteor.com is blocked.

Baidu, Ali, Qiniu, and Tencent are his suggestions for high volume, and high profile sites, that are inside the GFW.

meteor.com isn’t blocked here in China, it’s just slow to load, like many websites hosted outside of the country.

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.

Might depend on your particular ISP. I can access meteor.com from here in Beijing.

Yes, the failed one is cloudfront.net.

‘failed’ => ‘unstable’

-----------------------UPDATE: -------------------------

I have a try tonight, and I can download it right now.

Sure,It can download.
But as I try many times.It always be interrupted and download again.Enter an infinite loop.
Loaction Shanghai.

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.

See:

Note that the URL in step 2 should be replaced with the following if you prefer the 64-bit version of Meteor:

https://packages.meteor.com/bootstrap-link?arch=os.windows.x86_64

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Thanks @hwillson. Will a similar approach work for OSX and Linux?

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.).

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@hwillson thank you so much; this is really helpful. And, in general, thank you for all you do for the Meteor community – so far above and beyond. :grinning:

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