Meteor Development Environment - Eclipse with RSE plugin to VirtualBox VM

Getting up and running with Meteor was something which I lucked on as there are many considerations with hosted environments or rolling your own. As Meteor is not Windows native (why would ya), the most obvious way to get it up and running is in its own virtual machine.

So following these steps I was able to get a dev env up in Windows, but it should also work on other platforms):

1. Download Oracle's VirtualBox. Install it.
2. Download the OVF of the Nodejs VM (virtual Machine - or "Appliance") from here: Link
3. In VirtualBox File>Import Appliance... and load in the OVF VM.
4. Once done Start the virtual machine and run it the first time.

Now that you have your VM running, it's time to get Meteor on it. You can connect to the VM using an SSH client such as Putty, or for file exchange WinSCP is great. I opted out for the Remote System Explorer (RSE) plugin for Eclipse. This enables me to work on a remote linux box as if it were local (open/edit/save/ssh) So that's a cool thing anyway, I should try it on a 'real' server one day..

1. Using Eclipse as the editor, download and install the Remote System Explorer plugin Link
2. In the Remote Systems tab in Eclipse, right-click>Connect... to your running Nodejs VM.

You should now be able to browse to the Virtual Machine directly from Eclipse, open/save files as if they are locally on your PC.

You can also open up a terminal window to the machine directly in Eclipse ( right-click SSH Terminals>Connect.. > Launch. On the command line you just install Meteor as directed in www.meteor.com.

You can (and should) attach versioning plugins inside eclipse to connect and version the code at the repo of your choice that way.

I also set up a DNS redirector using no-ip for some external testing, redirecting port 80 to port 3000 on the VM. I found that it was super slow. So for external testing I ended up using my public IP directly, redirected to meteor server port 3000. Much quicker.

Anyway: Voilà - 'local' Meteor Dev Env for your responsive pleasure.