meteor-maintenance-mode

A simple package to enable maintenance mode for your app. For Meteor 1.3+, as it uses ecmascript, but in case you need it for older Meteor versions, it is quite easy to build.

Table of Contents

• Usage
• Concept
• API

Usage

In a startup file for both server and client, include the following

1import { Maintenance } from 'meteor/settlin:meteor-maintenance-mode';
2
3let allowedUserIds = [id1, id2];
4// required, so that you can login to your app, open up the console
5// and fire commands to toggle the modes as per your whims and fancies
6Maintenance.initialize({collection: 'settings', allowedUsers: allowedUserIds});
7
8// optional line
9// generally the maintenance mode is useful while deploying new versions of an app
10// hence it makes sense to reset the maintenance mode on new deployment, i.e. startup.
11Meteor.startup(function() { Maintenance.disable(); });

There is also an API end-point: /maintenance/<action>. Available actions are: enable and disable. You need to do a POST request with an authToken as data. eg.

curl --data '{"authToken": "12345"}' http://localhost:3500/maintenance/disable

This can be used in your deployment scripts to ensure that the users are alerted to maintenanceModes automatically.

Concept

1. Use a collection to have a single document {_id: 'maintenance', enabled: false}
2. Subscribe to this collection
3. Whenever this <exposedVariable>.status() (a reactive function, as it uses findOne) becomes true, modify client accordingly (this is not done by the package, has to be done by the user).

• You can render a different component/template on the same route (My preferred way).
• You can redirect the route to some maintenance.html
• Anything else that you want - Show notification messages, logout users, stop updates...

4. Allow changes to this maintenance collection, only by certain users on client. Maintenance variable is exposed on the client so that one can easily call Maintenance.enable()
5. API-endpoint. The authtoken sent via POST, is matched with the authToken provided during initialize. The initial authToken is a local variable for the package, and is never exposed to the Meteor server or client.

API

Server (Maintenance.<function>)

initialize(options)

options (all are optional)

• allowedUsers: Arrays of user ids - Users who can change the state from the client (Default: [])
• appId: For cases when same db is used for multiple apps, uss a different appId for each one (Default: 'maintenance')
• authToken: An authToken for REST API (Default: undefined)
• collection: Name of the collection, or the Mongo.Collection instance itself (Default: 'settings')
• exposedVariable: Variable that is available on client as a key of the window object (Default: 'Maintenance')

}

REST

If no authToken given during initialization, returns 501. If POST authToken does not match, returns 401.

/maintenance/enable

/maintenance/disable

Client (<exposedVariable>.<function>)

enable()

disable()

status()

Returns true or false.