README

Note: The meteor package frozeman:build-client is only a placeholder package, don't install.

Meteor Build Client

This tool builds and bundles the client part of a Meteor app with a simple index.html, so it can be hosted on any server or even loaded via the file:// protocol.

Installation

npm install -g meteor-build-client

Usage

// cd into your meteor app
cd /my/app

// run meteor-build-client
meteor-build-client ../output/directory

Important notes:

Warning: the content of the output folder will be deleted before building the new output! So don't do things like meteor-build-client /home!
Do not use dynamic imports! e.g. import('/eager/file');;
By default this package link legacy ES5 bundle build.

Output

The content of the output folder could look as follows:

index.html
a28817fe16898311635fa73b959979157e830a31.css
aeca2a21c383327235a08d55994243a9f478ed57.js
... (other files from your "public" folder)

For a list of options see:

meteor-build-client --help

Passing a settings.json

You can pass an additional settings file using the --settings or -s option:

meteor-build-client ../output/directory -s ../settings.json

Note Only the public property of that JSON file will be add to the Meteor.settings property.

App URL

Additionally you can set the ROOT_URL of your app using the --url or -u option:

meteor-build-client ../output/directory -u https://myserver.com

If you pass "default", your app will try to connect to the server where the application was served from. If this option was not set, it will set the server to "" (empty string) and will add a Meteor.disconnect() after Meteor was loaded.

Absolute or relative paths

If you want to be able to start you app by simply opening the index.html (using the file:// protocol), you need to link your files relative. You can do this by setting the --path or -p option:

meteor-build-client ../output/directory -p ""

The default path value is "/".

Note When set a path value, it will also replace this path in you Meteor CSS file, so that fonts etc link correctly.

Using your own build folder

To use pre-build Meteor application, built using meteor build command manually, specify the --usebuild <path-to-build> flag and meteor-build-client will not run the meteor build command.

Recommended packages for client-only build

If you're building server-less standalone web application we recommend to replace meteor-base with meteor and webapp packages.

@@ .meteor/packages
- meteor-base
+ meteor
+ webapp

Template

Following Meteor's recommended usage of <meteor-bundled-css /> and <meteor-bundled-js/> this tags will be replaced with links to generated CSS and JS files respectively. Optionally, use {{url-to-meteor-bundled-css}} as a placeholder for URL to generated CSS file. We encourage to use static-html (for non-Blaze projects) or blaze-html-templates (for Blaze projects) package for creating bare HTML template in your app, minimal example:

<!-- client/head.html -->
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <!-- recommended "fragment" to mark as JS-powered website for search engines -->
  <meta name="fragment" content="!">

  <title>My Meteor App</title>

  <!-- recommended "preload" for CSS bundle file -->
  <link rel="preload" href="{{url-to-meteor-bundled-css}}" as="style">
  <meteor-bundled-css />
</head>

Where <meteor-bundled-css /> will be replaced with <link /> element to generated CSS file(s) and {{url-to-meteor-bundled-css}} will be replaced with URL to generated CSS file.

<!-- client/body.html -->
<body>
  <meteor-bundled-js />
</body>

Where <meteor-bundled-js /> will be replaced with <script /> element(s) to generated JS file(s).

Connecting to a Meteor server

In order to connect to a Meteor servers, create DDP connection by using DDP.connect(), as seen in the following example:

// This Should be in both server and client in a lib folder
DDPConnection = (Meteor.isClient) ? DDP.connect('http://localhost:3000/') : {};

// When creating a new collection on the client use:
if(Meteor.isClient) {
  posts = new Mongo.Collection('posts', DDPConnection);

  // set the new DDP connection to all internal packages, which require one
  Meteor.connection = DDPConnection;
  Accounts.connection = Meteor.connection;
  Meteor.users = new Mongo.Collection('users');
  Meteor.connection.subscribe('users');

  // And then you subscribe like this:
  DDPConnection.subscribe('mySubscription');
}

Making routing work on a non Meteor server

To be able to open URLs and let them be handled by the client side JavaScript, you need to rewrite URLs on the server side, so they point always to index.html

Apache

For apache a .htaccess with mod_rewrite could look as follow:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /

  # Always pass through requests for files that exist
  # Per http://stackoverflow.com/a/7090026/223225
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
  RewriteRule . - [L]

  # Send all other requests to index.html where the JavaScript router can take over
  # and render the requested route
  RewriteRule ^.*$ index.html [L]
</IfModule>

nginx:

Use try_files and error_page to redirect all requests to non-existent files to index.html

server {
  listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;
  index index.html;
  server_name myapp.com;
  root /var/www/myapp;

  error_page 404 =200 /index.html;
  
  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
  }
}

Usage no npm install needed!