meteor-build-fetcher

What's this do?

This package downloads remote code to be served as part of a Meteor app. Often, we run into the situation of having static files from a CDN as part of a Meteor application, and they get dumped into the compatibility folder, often in a minified form, and just end up taking up space in your repo. This package allows you to integrate such files into your Meteor app by having the server download them during the build process and serve them locally. It's a simpler way to accomplish what git submodules are sometimes used for and without depending on clients to be able to access external servers once the project is built.

Build fetcher can also help with not needing random bash scripts to download files into your project by making the download part of the build process.

Usage

Files with the extension .fetch.json are processed by this plugin. Each such file should contain an array of the following form:

1[
2    {
3        "file": "ace.js",
4        "url": "https://raw.github.com/ajaxorg/ace-builds/3bded0bc1b5b51f74afd2f8dafb768ab8f35b00b/src-min/ace.js",
5        "bare": true
6    }
7]

• file: specifies the local filename. The file will appear in the same directory as the .fetch.json file.
• url: specifies the remote url that the file will be fetched from.
• bare: for Javascript files, whether the file should be wrapped in a closure.

Meteor will treat a foo.fetch.json file as a normal part of the build process. If the file changes, the builder will go through and download all of the sources again. If the file doesn't change, the built source (i.e. fetched files) will be kept in place.

In regular apps

First, install the package:

$ meteor add mizzao:build-fetcher

Then, just put a foo.fetch.json file whereever you want, and Javascript files will magically appear as part of your app when it is built. If it is in the client directory, it will appear in the client manifest, and so on for the server.

In smart packages

1Package.onUse(function (api) {
2  api.use("mizzao:build-fetcher@VERSION");
3
4  // ... other stuff
5});

where VERSION is the usually the latest available version of this package.

Then, you will need to manually load the .fetch.json with a Package.use command. Be sure to specify client or server, or leave it out if you want both.

Examples

• https://github.com/mizzao/meteor-jqueryui/blob/master/jqueryui.fetch.json downloads the jquery-ui javascript, css, and theme images for the meteor-jqueryui package.
• https://github.com/mizzao/meteor-openlayers/blob/master/openlayers.fetch.json downloads the JS and CSS files for the OpenLayers mapping library.

Notes

• The package uses Meteor's caching-compiler to download files only when the

contents of the .fetch.json file change.

• It would be nice to figure out clean ways to support non-JS and non-CSS content of different forms. Currently only binary is supported.