Install
Meteor currently supports OS X, Windows, and Linux. Only 64-bit is supported. Apple M1 is natively supported from Meteor 2.5.1 onward (for older versions, you will need to run with a rosetta terminal).
Prerequisites and useful information
- If you are on a Mac M1 (Arm64 version) you need to have Rosetta 2 installed, as Meteor uses it for running MongoDB. Check how to install it here
- Meteor works with Node.js version >= 10 and <= 14, for Windows you need to have Node.js installed for running the npm installer (tip: you can use nvm for managing node versions).
- 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 running one of the commands below.
For Linux and OS X:
curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh
For Windows (Node.js is required):
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.
PATH management
By default, the Meteor installer adds its install path (by default, ~/.meteor/) to your PATH by updating either your .bashrc, .bash_profile, or .zshrc as appropriate. To disable this behavior, install Meteor by running:
npm install -g meteor --ignore-meteor-setup-exec-path
(or by setting the environment variable npm_config_ignore_meteor_setup_exec_path=true)
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.
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