Porting Meteor apps to Sandstorm in three minutes
By Kenton Varda - 12 Aug 2014
As you know, Sandstorm apps can be written using any tech stack that runs on Linux. We have apps written in PHP, Python, Node.js, C++, Go, and even Rust.
But if you’re starting from scratch and need to choose, the easiest way to write a Sandstorm app today is using Meteor. Meteor is a modern open source web framework that makes it ridiculously easy to build high-quality, low-latency, real-time web apps quickly. Sandstorm’s own front-end is built on Meteor.
I recently gave a lightning talk at Meteor Devshop where I demonstrated porting a Meteor app to Sandstorm. The app I chose was written by independent developers with no intent to target our platform. As you’ll see, it took me under three minutes to port live on stage:
Note: The video shows the process for older versions of Meteor, in which packages had to be installed with the separate tool Meteorite (mrt). This blog post has since been updated for Meteor 0.9.x, which has its own built-in package repository.
When it comes to writing a Sandstorm app, Meteor works particularly well as a platform because it tends to produce self-contained apps. Meteor’s tools already know how to construct a “bundle” containing all of the app’s dependencies. From there, we just need to add Node and Mongo, and we have ourselves a Sandstorm package. We don’t even need to use our trick to automatically detect dependencies.
To make this even easier, we’ve written a tool called meteor-spk which automates this. We’ve also published a Meteor package kenton:accounts-sandstorm which integrates Meteor’s accounts system with Sandstorm’s unified login. Together, these mean that porting a Meteor app to Sandstorm usually involves three commands:
meteor add kenton:accounts-sandstorm
meteor-spk init
meteor-spk pack myapp.spk
Our intrepid fan Jake Weisz – who previously contributed a port of EtherCalc – has used this tool to port Meteor Blocks, a simple voxel-based model editor written using Meteor. You can find it on the Sandstorm app list now – try the demo if you don’t already have your own server.
We hope to see tools like this developed for other frameworks in the future. meteor-spk is just a simple bash script wrapping Sandstorm’s spk tool and providing a dependency bundle to merge into the package. If you’d like to contribute a similar script for your own favorite framework, let us know!
Disclosure: Jade Wang, a member of the Sandstorm project, also works for Meteor, but Sandstorm and Meteor are not affiliated.