Small Local area network application - Just use meteor run tool?

#1

Hello,

I have developed a small Meteor application at work for project planning / management. We’re a small company so it works great for us - now they want me to develop it even further and would become an essential tool for the company (planning to log hours & extract financial data)

We have a bunch of windows based servers in our LAN for network drives, application licenses, etc. - right now I just have meteor installed on one of the machines, the project is being pulled from a git repo and I just run the meteor run command in the machine itself to run the app. Then people open their browsers, point them to the machine’s IP address on port 3000 and use the app happily.

Is there anything wrong with this kind of setup / using the development MongoDB instance for a small-scale local application? I got a daily automated task that backs up the mongoDB data just in case. Any good reason I would have to go through a full-scale windows-based development (have it deployed locally is a priority and we have no linux machines), as I’ve read it can be quite tricky?

#2

Hey @megaleon,

No problem with running it in development mode except that it runs slower and uses more resources (on server and client). Building and running on windows is surprisingly easy though.

I do windows deploys on our work local network quite frequently (for kiosk apps).
My process is to structure each app like so:

/          <-- root contains .git folder
/src       <-- contains meteor app
/scripts   <-- contains run scripts for windows
/bundle    <-- target directory for builds

Then in the src folder I run:

meteor build --directory  ../

Using --directory saves me from having to extract the compiled bundle

Then in scripts I have:

development-settings.json
production-settings.json
runDev.bat    <-- just changes dir to `../src` and runs meteor with settings-development
runBuild.bat  <-- loads production-settings.json into `METEOR_SETTINGS` sets `ROOT_URL`, `PORT` and `MONGO_URL` before changing dir to `../bundle` and running `node main.js`

So it can be easily started.
I usually just pop a shortcut the script into the startup folder

Happy to help answer any questions you have

#3

Hey @coagmano, thanks for taking the time to advice and go through your setup, looks very streamlines. I’ll keep the development environment for now buy definitely going to try and experiment with a similar setup to get the hand of it. Thanks again!