I use a PortableApps thumb drive to do a lot of work while I’m away from my home office, that work including working on a number of web projects whenever I have some extended down time and there’s a Windows computer available for my use. Now I’m beginning a new project – hopefully the first of many – using Meteor, and wish BADLY to be able to continue those impromptu work sessions.
There’s a portable Node environment that opens a terminal with Node and npm ready to go. Does anyone know of ANY WAY at all that I can either install Meteor onto my thumb drive – an essential prerequisite is that it can be done without admin privileges – or is there a way to run Meteor from within this portable Node environment? Anything at all would be greatly appreciated!!
Somewhere I stumbled across a web page that mentioned installing Meteor as an npm package (I can’t remember the context), so I gave it a try, hoping that it would in some magical way add Meteor to an existing project (I tried it on an empty Node project). It looked like it was going to actually be successful until it suddenly failed at the fibers installation. Just an interesting development, in case it’s helpful to the real geniuses out there.
I’d hoped to spark some kind of interest, but my question is either way over everybody’s head (HIGHLY unlikely) or it’s such a noob question that no one wants to waste their time ;-). If there’s something particularly crazy about my question I’d appreciate any advice at all. Truly!
Hi @rob1grie
As an alternative to this you can use a cloud IDE. Back a while I was using nitrous ide alas it is shut down now. But there are other cloud ide’ there like cloud9 etc
That’s actually a great idea, thanks. Actually yesterday I stumbled across codeanywhere.com, really like its interface, but the corporate network I spend half of my remote time behind blocks me testing the project I’m working on; may as well just use my Netbeans! But you make a great suggestion, my brain hadn’t progressed to see what other cloud-based IDEs there may be. Thanks again!
Very interesting! If I could just get it to work … I’ve spent the last hour trying to get an empty boilerplate meteor app to run using Cloud 9 and it’s one hurdle after another. Before I spend too many more hours I’ll keep looking before I invest the time to make it work. Very cool tool though, Thanks again!!
I thought I really had it for a minute. Between NodeJSPortable and an article here (https://github.com/meteor/docs/blob/version-NEXT/long-form/alternate-windows-installation.md) about an option that appears to allow a “manual” Meteor installation on Windows, I thought I had all the tools I needed. But, besides being painfully slow to install and initialize on a thumb drive, meteor crashed because of file naming permissions and erroneous symlinks.
All I want to do is work on my code; endless hours of trying to get the dev environment to even work makes me want to just go back to HTML! (Not really)
Yes, that would be very nice. But buried in the beginning of this thread I mention that (1) it has to be portable, and (2) I rarely if ever have admin rights where I’m working remotely.
I did see a post in the Docker forums asking about “portable Docker” and it looks like the only way so far to accomplish that is run VirtualBox on my thumb drive. I tried that when I first set out on this adventure and … well, it’s been so long now that I don’t remember what problem I had. Seems like PortableVirtualBox was less than stable, but I can’t remember. (Maybe there is some truth to problems for aging developers!)
Thanks for the suggestion though, it definitely bears revisiting!!