Hi,
I just started the Discover Meteor tutorial. I’m in China. When I get to the part where I install bootstrap (meteor add twbs:bootstrap), the connection always fails, or hangs at “Updating package catalog”.
I’ve tried from several different machines, and no dice. Where do meteor packages get pulled from? Does anyone know if they’re blocked China-wide? Can’t see why they would be…
Are there Chinese mirrors, and any way to configure meteor to use different repos?
Thanks
hmur
You could visit the github page of the package and clone that. However, you would have to keep track of updates yourself
OR if you’re feeling adventurous, you could upgrade to 1.3 beta and npm install bootstrap!!!
But actually I just realised you’re starting off with the Discover Meteor tut so perhaps disregard that hotheaded suggestion.
Aside: I recently went back to china and boy am I glad it was only two weeks. The level of censorship there meant I couldn’t use google (maps, translate, search) or reach half of the blog/dev/hn sites I take for granted in my day to day. I thought VPNs was the way to go no?
Also, I don’t know if I should say this but most of the contents in Discover Meteor is obsolete and will not work going forward in Meteor 1.3 so I’m not sure if it’s such a good place to start anymore. Topics such as Blaze and IronRouter are definitely not supported going forward. MDG recommends starting with React instead of Blaze and either FlowRouter or React Router.
Re: VPNs and China:
My PPTP VPNs stopped working a few weeks ago, and I haven’t had any luck trying to get Strongswan-based VPNs working on Ubuntu 15.10. All I can use now is Tor, and I’m not leet enough to pipe my terminal-based stuff through it.
Further, blocked sites aren’t the only problem; many sites aren’t blocked but are excruciatingly slow, if they’re hosted outside of China. I don’t know if this is intentional, to provide an advantage to domestic sites, or if it’s just because the Great Firewall is overloaded.
Re: Discover Meteor:
I’m really sorry to read this a few weeks after I’ve paid for the book. I will start another thread asking for recommendations for tutorials, because I don’t want to waste my time learning anything obsolete.
Thank you for your replies.
Don’t feel bad, I bought the book, developed on it for almost a year and now half that knowledge is obsolete. There are ppl here who’ve built whole companies on this stuff, feel sorry for them!
As for what tutorials is good, that’s a hard one to answer with Meteor in it’s current state. Maybe spend some time reading some of the more popular topics, they might give you more questions but you’d have a better understanding of why it’s really hard to recommend any tutorials atm.
The Meteor Guide should be a solid place to start, however it baffles me why they still write about Blaze when the company announced they’re dropping it and that our next apps should be started with React.
What do you mean about “Meteor in its current state”? This would be my first framework. I learned some Ruby in the past (from a book), but I’ve never coded a complete project before. Is the Meteor framework suitable for use by newbies, or is it in such constant flux that I wouldn’t be able to find appropriate learning material?
He means that some parts of Meteor are changing at the moment, f.e. Iron:Router isn’t maintained anymore and Meteor recommends FlowRouter. In the case of Blaze (template engine), Meteor recommends ReactJS in the future - but don’t get scared, it is okay when you start discovering Meteor with Iron:Router and Blaze, you can still build apps with both.