Meteor: How to install Meteor and get a project started in less than 5 minutes

/ Chris Nielsen

In this article, I want to detail how to install Meteor and get a project quickly up and running.

 

Step 1: Install Meteor

In order to install Meteor, the first step according to the installation instructions is to install a tool called “chocolatey”.
https://chocolatey.org/install

This can be installed with a cmd.exe command.

Once that is installed, run the following command in the command window running in Administrator mode.

choco install meteor

For more information see:
https://www.meteor.com/install

 

Step 2: Create a Meteor app project

For this step, close down the original cmd window and open a fresh copy, running in Administrator mode. At the admin command window run the following command:

meteor create myapp

Then cd to myapp and run this command:

meteor npm install

Once that is complete, simply launch meteor like so:

meteor

Now there should be some files and folders inside the newly created myapp folder. For example:

This will also ‘activate’ the project so that it appears in the web browser using Meteor’s built-in server at location:

http://localhost:3000/

Which looks like this:

The client/main.html file is the file that holds the basic UI of the newly created Meteor app. The code for a default app looks like this:

<head>
  <title>myapp</title>
</head>

<body>
  <h1>Welcome to Meteor!</h1>

  {{> hello}}
  {{> info}}
</body>

<template name="hello">
  <button>Click Me</button>
  <p>You've pressed the button {{counter}} times.</p>
</template>

<template name="info">
  <h2>Learn Meteor!</h2>
  <ul>
    <li><a href="https://www.meteor.com/try" target="_blank">Do the Tutorial</a></li>
    <li><a href="http://guide.meteor.com" target="_blank">Follow the Guide</a></li>
    <li><a href="https://docs.meteor.com" target="_blank">Read the Docs</a></li>
    <li><a href="https://forums.meteor.com" target="_blank">Discussions</a></li>
  </ul>
</template>

Note: To switch between Meteor apps, type CTRL+c twice in the cmd window to close the current application. Then cd to the location of another Meteor app and simply type the command:

meteor

For more information see:
https://guide.meteor.com/index.html