How to prevent Meteor from watching files?

Question

I would like to use Dojo Toolkit with Meteor.

I first copy the whole Dojo Toolkit tree in /public

Then, I include it on the client side with:

<script src="/dojo/dojo.js" data-dojo-config="async: true"></script>`

Everything works fine, except Meteor is actually monitoring every single file in /public for changes, so that it can restart the server. This is actually causing a very long delay during the first request on localhost:3000.

Is there a way of preventing Meteor from watching files from a certain directory?

Dojo Toolkit is 10k+ files so I get the EMFILE error stated here, corrected with

sudo sh -c 'echo 16384 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches'

I finally found a workaround. I'm putting everything in /public/lib/. Then, line 286 of /usr/lib/meteor/app/run.js, I'm adding the folder I don't want Meteor to watch: `self.exclude_paths = [ path.join(app_dir, '.meteor', 'local'), path.join(app_dir, 'public', 'lib') ]; ` This way I can have as much files as I want in lib, and they don't slow everything down. include path is '/lib/dojo/dojo.js'. — Mathieu, Jul 23 '12 at 12:06
nice fix, you should send them a patch and post this as an answer below — Milimetric, Oct 27 '12 at 01:43
The workaround @Mathieu suggests should work fine for this purpose, but Meteor should support something like this natively. This is also filed as a GitHub Issue, which is the appropriate place to continue discussing this matter, or to track its resolution. https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/437 — avital, Dec 14 '12 at 00:37
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15936091/turn-off-file-watching-in-meteor — Bjoern Rennhak, May 22 '13 at 17:17
@BjoernRennhak you know that the answer in the question you linked is in fact a quote from this topic right? — g00glen00b, May 27 '13 at 21:54
I don't have a `/usr/lib/meteor`. Running OS X and installed through the Meteor script. — Jonatan Littke, Jun 18 '13 at 08:02
Not sure if this may help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14823783/how-to-disable-hot-code-push-in-meteor-js-in-development — Jonatan Littke, Jul 09 '13 at 11:17

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

realised this is duplicate to: generating and serving static files with Meteor

see: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/437

This was a major problem for me. I have to serve ~12000 static images, which I initially put into the public folder. This caused node to use nearly 100% of one CPU core, constantly. With limited memory the app crashes.

The workaround I'm using for the moment

create the folder public/.#static/ and move all static assets into it. This folder isn't watched by meteor
prefix urls with static (/img/cat.png -> /static/img/cat.png)

install the mime npm package

cd ~/.meteor/tools/latest/lib/node_modules/
npm install mime

create a rawConnectionHandler to serve the assets (credits to: https://stackoverflow.com/a/20358612) server/static_files_handler.coffee

fs = Npm.require('fs')
mime = Npm.require('mime')
WebApp.rawConnectHandlers.use (req, res, next) ->
  re = /^\/static\/(.*)$/.exec(req.url)
  if re isnt null # Only handle URLs that start with /static/*
    filePath = process.env.PWD + "/public/.#static/" + re[1]
    type = mime.lookup(filePath)
    data = fs.readFileSync(filePath, data)
    res.writeHead 200,
      "Content-Type": type

    res.write data
    res.end()
  else # Other urls will have default behaviors
    next()
  return

Limitations of this approach:

not suitable to serve assets with query parameters. The regex would also match /static/html/image.html?src=/static/img/cat.png trying to serve a file with the filename including the parameters. This is easy to change.
Meteor is completely unaware of the files, they therefore don't get included into the appcache manifest. If you want to make them available offline, check out the addPaths option I added to https://github.com/buildhybrid/appcache-extra

If you don't want to work around the problems, consider serving the assets from an external service (ex. AWS S3).

there is a problem if you will go and deploy this app on *.meter.com - this will cause an error - thats because of Meteor ignores (and actually have no) .#static directory — Ivan M, Apr 10 '15 at 15:58

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Aug 24 '13 at 19:46

This is a big issue for large scale applications built in Meteor. I talked to Matt over at Meteor, and he said that their team is working on a solution to this problem for one of their upcoming releases. So get on their newsletter, and you'll be notified when it is available.

Mathieu, your comment:

I finally found a workaround. I'm putting everything in /public/lib/. Then, line 286 of /usr/lib/meteor/app/run.js, I'm adding the folder I don't want Meteor to watch: self.exclude_paths = [ path.join(app_dir, '.meteor', 'local'), path.join(app_dir, 'public', 'lib') ]; This way I can have as much files as I want in lib, and they don't slow everything down. include path is '/lib/dojo/dojo.js'.

is a good hack for now, and here are the other issues that relate that will also be covered in the upcoming release:

Some packages have overlapping dependencies, but do not exclude them like in PHP's require_once().
A native require / define dynamic script loader, so not all files are loaded on entry one that can calculate dependency order without having to go levels, lib or main.*
An official way to create and deploy packages to a repository. Currently it is using Meteorite (mrt) and Atmosphere.

The goal is to have meteor serve but not watch the asset files in a directory, preferably all the large video files I have in public. Does your exclude_paths line continue to serve the files? — Wes Modes, Mar 15 '15 at 03:29

How to prevent Meteor from watching files?

2 Answers2

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