0.6 - Specifying a path for Meteor no longer works

[timhaines]

Using Meteorite 0.5, I often use a path to a local copy of meteor when I'm working on a fork or Meteor PR. This no longer seems to work in Meteorite 0.6. Instead it appears to be looking for meteor in ~/.meteor when a path is specified.

[tmeasday]

I'll take a look at this when I have a moment. For now you can just run the meteor executable from that path directly.

[mitar]

Yes, how can we run custom version of Meteor? Previously, we could specify branch or git repository and mrt used that. Now this is not possible anymore or at least it does not seem to work. Documentation still documents mrt create my-app --branch devel on the top of the documentation. But mrt does not use devel branch of Meteor.

[Tarang]

I think one of the reasons the feature was removed was because with the Meteor version 0.6.0+ you can simply modify the packages over at https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/master/packages and place them in your /packages folder to sort of do an override. It help's a bit with keeping stuff up to date too. @tmeasday put it out on meteor-talk but as you mentioned you were away

I'm not entirely sure if it would be helpful depending on what you've made custom but if youve modified one of the packages it might be easier to go this way instead

[mitar]

We have our custom fork of Meteor (of Meteor tools as well, not just packages) and before it was really great that we could specify the fork and everything and froze that in the git repository so that whoever cloned the repository could easily (just by running mrt) get Meteor from that fork. This is currently impossible to do easily.

Also just having modified official packages in /packages is really bad when you want to update to newer code from Meteor official repository. Because you copy-paste the code there in the first place. It is much easier to keep few commits over the Meteor official repository.

[tmeasday]

@mitar is it not working? AFAIK using a git definition for meteor (in smart.json) works as long as you run mrt.

This bug is about using path definition, which doesn't work for some trivial reason I can't quite remember (sorry @timhaines !), although of course it's easily worked around by just running the relevant meteor executable directly.

At the very least you should be able to install all your packages with mrt install and then run a checked out Meteor executable from wherever. But, again, you shouldn't have to do that. Let me know (and maybe open a separate bug if it doesn't work).

[mitar]

OK, I will try it now again.

[mitar]

Sorry for the noise, it really works! Thanks!

[shrop]

Seems like "path" in smart.json is still not working for me. Getting "Error: there was a problem parsing your smart.json file" I validated my smart.json file and it is valid JSON. Is path still broken at this point?

[tmeasday]

Yes, it is @shrop. Is it a feature you make heavy use of? A simple symlink will do the job I think..

[shrop]

Thanks @tmeasday! A symlink into the package folder? I am getting around it by committing to a branch and setting the smart.json file to use a git repo with a file:/// path. I was trying to get around having to have code committed to test, but it isn't a huge deal.

[tmeasday]

Hi @shrop do you mean you were using "path" for packages? That should work. It sounds like perhaps you just made a typo.

[shrop]

yep.. sorry if I tagged onto an unrelated issue :) but thanks for helping. I will try it out again.