What are the main differences of demeteorizer and meteor bundle?

Question

Having gone through and used demeteorizer. I wonder what are the main differences between setting up meteor vs demeteorizer and running it via node; on own server?

meteor only

1. hot swappable code?
2. problem in maintaining packages similar from production and dev
3. same meteor versions running on prod and dev
4. hardcoded environment settings (i.e. mongo)

demeteorizer

1. platform independant as this auto bundles dependancies and uses pure nodejs
2. organise and maintain mongodb how you like (backup scripts etc)

I have been using demeteorizer (packaging->upload->running forever), but wonder if there are any performance or issues in the long run.

I have seen packages such as "authentication" running okay locally but very slow on the test server (hangs on submit, indicating sync problems?)

thanks in advance.

ref: https://twitter.com/SachaGreif/status/424908644590030848

Answer 1

Demeteorizer builds on top of meteor bundle with one small difference: Demeteorizer builds a package.json for you and deletes the node_modules directories.

Without demeteorizer you would have a bit of trouble deploying your app, particularly if it was on a different platform to the one you built your app on.

If you see meteor's own docs, you have to remove fibers and manage your npm modules yourself, manually. With a package.json you can run npm install and have them all installed for you, including ones from packages.

Why is this useful? For services like modulus it means you can upload an app and have it install all your dependencies for you without you having to think about it, as if it were an ordinary node-js app.

Everything that applies to meteor bundle will also apply to demeteorizer as it is still the same meteor bundled app, just with the package.json. So you can use forever, hard coded/environment based settings, etc the same way.