Reviving an old Meteor project

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If you have read this article on Bun then you may have found that Meteor has also been targeted by the author:

  • Back in 2014 Meteor JS came out and promised to do everything in one frontend/backend framework. It would handle websockets for you, and do reactive updating of the DOM and assume backend success but automatically rollback the UI if the request failed, to make the UI feel real fast and snappy. It let you have multiple people interacting with content on the same page in real time. And all you had to do was use their all-in-one CLI to run your project locally and deploy it to a free online test bed using your own custom project name.
  • In 2023 I tried to run my 2014 Meteor project again and the version of the CLI that is compatible with the project doesn’t exist any more and the project cannot be ran locally or deployed without completely re-writing the entire project to the latest version of Meteor. All documentation for the 2014 version is just gone

I was asking them for the project and fortunately the gave me access. I revived it and wrote an article about it:

Was actually quite enjoyable and fun to see such old code running with minimal modification on 2.13.3 :smirk:

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We still have full documentation of pre-1 versions here: https://learn-meteor.netlify.app/ and I also have the repo of the official book Discover Meteor.

Not that it matters in any way :))

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Thanks for sharing your article, @jkuester! Very well done!

We also have a blog post on “How to update an app that uses an old version of MeteorJS?” I just added your article as a reference to it.

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Great article. Did you specifically select the magazine. The cover of it also giving subliminal message :joy:

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Today you’ve set the bar for how a Meteor “ambassador” should act. Truly a class act! :clap: :clap: :clap:

But now since you’ve revived the project can you please contact the author to edit his remark about Meteor? Maybe tell him to start a separate article??

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  • In 2023 I tried to run my 2014 Meteor project again and the version of the CLI that is compatible with the project doesn’t exist any more and the project cannot be ran locally or deployed […]

I am wondering about the part on the cli not existing and not being able to run the project locally. I just tried running the app, and it worked fine. The latest version of Meteor is still able to download version 0.8.3 and springboard to it. Maybe this is related to the docs for the installer or the readme for the npm installer? It seems to be a common misconception that the installer version is important, when all you need to do is install the latest version and Meteor will handle installing the version needed by the app.

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