Getting Meteor to 1.0

Getting Meteor to 1.0
meteor.com

I really wanted to like it. I was predisposed to do so.

But from the very beginning, I was confronted with something I consider a deal breaker. While I am wary and generally disinclined toward the increasingly popular pattern of curl an installation script and pipe into sh, in this case it is not only skeptical, it is downright ludicrous. Why would I, nay anyone, want to install an npm package this way? Should not the installation instructions simply be `npm install -g meteor`? And what if I need to work on multiple meteor projects with different versions? Surely there is support for adding it to your package.json file, but why is this not the primary means of installation and well documented?

Maybe I am being overly sensitive to these issues, but it really baffled me that the very foundation upon which a meteor project is predicated would be contradictory to the typical node workflow. I will probably try meteor to spike out a project at some point in time, but I do not foresee myself using it extensively in the near future.

Then create a site with it and specify whatever local version of meteor you want.

The deets: https://github.com/oortcloud/meteorite/

$ curl https://install.meteor.com | /bin/sh; meteor create myapp; cd myapp; meteor

you're up and running with a complete stack including MongoDB, node, the dozen-ish core packages that make up the Meteor pubsub and realtime templating stack, and the 'meteor' build tool (which can do things like compile coffeescript and less, generate source maps, minify your production code, and provide a realtime development environment where whenever you save a file your app updates in your browser.)

As for versioning, it's actually got a great way of doing that. Each of your Meteor projects is locked to a specific Meteor release version (similar to an Ubuntu release, it's a release-engineered snapshot of the Meteor core packages), which you can set with the `meteor update` command. And this has automatic `npm shrinkwrap` integration so that if you use npm packages alongside Meteor packages, everyone on your team is always running exactly the same versions of all of the code in your app. The Meteor tools automatically handle all the work of downloading any needed Meteor versions and keeping them installed side-by-side on your laptop, using the correct one for a given project, and notifying you of available updates.