Appendix A. Installing Meteor
This appendix covers
- Prerequisites for installing Meteor
- How to install Meteor on a development machine
In this appendix we’ll highlight the prerequisites of Meteor and walk you through installing it. Unless you’re on Windows, you can issue a single command to get started with Meteor, but we’ll cover all major platforms.
In contrast to many other web development tools, Meteor is a self-contained installation and doesn’t require any particular software to be present. The installer will put Node.js as well as MongoDB in your home directory so they won’t conflict with any other instances installed by package managers such as brew or apt-get. To ensure a fully working environment, Meteor will always use the binaries it installed.
Currently supported platforms include the following:
- Mac OS X 10.7 and later
- Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2012
- Linux (x86 and x86_64 systems)
BSD and other operating systems aren’t supported. Using virtualization—for example, by running a Vagrant box (we’ll discuss Vagrant in a moment)—it’s possible to install Meteor and start developing on unsupported systems as well.
If you can’t install Meteor or prefer to run it on the cloud, you can use Nitrous (http://nitrous.io/). It offers an IDE in the cloud without the need to install anything locally.