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meteor/docs/source/install.md
2021-11-17 16:05:50 -04:00

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Install

Meteor currently supports OS X, Windows, and Linux. Only 64-bit is supported. Apple M1 is only supported from Meteor 2.5.1 onward.

Prerequisites and useful information

  • Meteor requires Node.js 8 or newer installed for running the npm installer.
  • Meteor supports Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 and up.
  • Disabling antivirus (Windows Defender, etc.) will improve performance.
  • For compatibility, Linux binaries are built with CentOS 6.4 i386/amd64.
  • iOS development requires the latest Xcode.
  • Do not install meteor npm in your project's package.json by any means, the npm library is only an installer.

Installation

Install the latest official Meteor release from your terminal:

npm install -g meteor

Troubleshooting

If your user doesn't have permission to install global binaries, and you need to use sudo, it's necessary to append --unsafe-perm to the above command:

sudo npm install -g meteor --unsafe-perm

We strongly discourage the usage of Node.js or Meteor with root permissions. Only run the above command with sudo if you know what you are doing.

If you only use sudo because of a distribution default permission system, check this link for fixing it.

In some cases you can get this error npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules because your Node.js installation was performed with wrong permissions. An easy way to fix this is to install Node.js using nvm and forcing it to be used in your terminal. You can force it in the current session of your terminal by running nvm use 14.

Old Versions on Apple M1

For Apple M1 computers, you can append Rosetta prefix as following, if you need to run older versions of Meteor (before 2.5.1):

arch -x86_64 npm install -g meteor

or select Terminal in the Applications folder, press CMD(⌘)+I and check the "Open using Rosetta" option.

Legacy Installation Method

For Linux and OS X, we are still providing the legacy installation method which uses a bash script and doesn't depend on Node.

curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh

This installation method is not maintained anymore, and you should always use the NPM one.

Run Meteor inside Docker

You can also use a Docker container for running Meteor inside your CI, or even in your local development toolchain.

We do provide the meteor/meteor-base ubuntu-based Docker image, that comes pre-bundled with Node.JS and Meteor, and runs it as a local user (not as root).

You can refer to our meteor/galaxy-images repository to see how to use it, and the latest version. More about meteor-base here.

Note for Windows users

On Windows, the installer runs faster when Windows Developer Mode is enabled. The installation extracts a large number of small files, which Windows Defender can cause to be very slow.

Node version manager

If you use a node version manager that uses a separate global node_modules folder for each Node version, you will need to re-install the meteor npm package when changing to a Node version for the first time. Otherwise, the meteor command will no longer be found.

Note for fish shell users (Linux)

To be able to user meteor command from fish it's needed to include /home/<user>/.meteor in $PATH; to do that just add this line in /home/<user>/.config/fish/config.fish file (replace <user> with your username):

set PATH /home/<user>/.meteor $PATH

Uninstalling Meteor

If you installed Meteor using npm, you can remove it by running: meteor-installer uninstall

If you installed Meteor using curl, you can remove it by running: rm -rf ~/.meteor sudo rm /usr/local/bin/meteor