Windows/Desktop Application using Meteor

mayankmathur · September 3, 2015, 9:25am

Hello All Community members,

Since im pretty new to Meteor Framework and its associated components like Atom + MongoDB.
I’ve been reading examples on Meteor’s official website but what i find is all Web based apps running on default Localhost or hosted on meteor.com itself.
What i m looking for is to develop a Desktop Application using Meteor. I find people talking about Electron for same purpose as well and im bit direction-less at this moment, as a beginner to this framework.

Looking forward to some timely assistance on procedure to build standalone desktop apps using Meteor !

Thanks.
Mayank

fvilers · September 3, 2015, 9:41am

Electrify is definitively what you are looking for.

barbaroskurt · September 3, 2015, 2:07pm

it’s really great !

meteor create --example leaderboard
cd leaderboard
meteor add arboleya:electrify
meteor

this community is going to be very crazy

ralpheiligan · September 4, 2015, 4:34am

I followed the code above and also the code github electrify … however after typing electify got an error og Can't find npm module I am running on windows 7 64 bit

ralpheiligan · September 4, 2015, 4:34am

If I get it correctly will this launch a desktop app of the leaderboard?

none · September 4, 2015, 6:24am

It’s amazing!
Just added meteor add arboleya:electrify and got Linux application from my meteor code! Very cool (-:

mayankmathur · September 4, 2015, 9:42am

Hello all,
I tried steps mentioned here : https://atmospherejs.com/arboleya/electrify

But i didnt understood what happened. It did :-

created new folder called .electrify in project root folder
Inside of it, there are package.json and index.js file.

How can i make my application executable and standalone this way ?

Thanks for all your assistance thus far !
Waiting for more inputs.

ralpheiligan · September 9, 2015, 2:57am

any help out there?

fvilers · September 9, 2015, 6:01am

Start a meteor shell when your application is running (with meteor run) and type in: electrify. This will generate the executable (compiled for the current architecture) in the “dist” directory.

mayankmathur · September 9, 2015, 8:43am

Hello Everyone and thanks for all your assistance.
I managed to generate Executable using electrify, but it wasnt that easy as was looking earlier. Few hiccups
, few R&D and finally done !

ralpheiligan · September 10, 2015, 4:00am

can you share your steps here @mayankmathur please

ralpheiligan · September 10, 2015, 4:02am

@fvilers as I said above I encountered this error when running electrify

fvilers · September 10, 2015, 5:25am

Normally, you don’t have to install a standalone NodeJS for Meteor development. But, maybe Electron/electrify requires it. I do have a NodeJS installation so I can’t test right now.

waldgeist · September 10, 2015, 6:22am

Just as an additional info: Besides Electron, there’s also Node WebKit. And a third solution I have been successfully integrated Meteor with is Brackets Shell, which is the foundation on which the open source editor Brackets is based on (both available on GitHub). I did this because I liked the dark theming of Brackets, but the Brackets team does not really encourage / support 3rd party apps and points to Node WebKit instead. Haven’t tried Electron as the new kid on the block so far, but looks quite appealing for sure.

ralpheiligan · September 10, 2015, 8:23am

thanks… i’ll try installing the standalone node+npm see if it will work.

narven · September 10, 2015, 9:04am

this is awesome

/me dancing

mayankmathur · September 10, 2015, 10:11am

basically i installed node.js separately as it was creating some issues. Try out this way.

corvid · September 10, 2015, 12:00pm

Depends pretty heavily on your application. For example, if you are using a client-only based application and connecting via DDP to a remote service, that can be done pretty easily. I have a sample here

I would also highly recommend arboleya:electrify, it’s very well maintained and works quite well for pretty much everything,

How can i make my application executable and standalone this way ?

Go into your project root and use electrify (which should be installed via NPM). If you don’t have it: npm install -g electrify

Alternatively, start up your meteor application, open another terminal, use meteor shell and type electrify

gentunian · September 11, 2015, 5:12pm

You also have electron

Anyway, I’ve tested Atom text editor. Is extremely slow. I don’t know how this meteor desktop apps will perform.

Any ideas?

larry · May 10, 2016, 6:40am

I tried making an electrify app and the filesize was 764MB. That’s just way too large of a file, and the app was just a modified to-do list. It wasn’t this large until Meteor 1.3 came out. Now Electrify’s unusable, all of the NPM packages Meteor uses now makes the electrified app way too large.