There’s a lot of really exciting and long-anticipated updates in our 2.0 release, so let’s dive right into them.

It’s no secret that free deploys were great in the early days of Meteor. The community has been asking to have it as a nice way to expose the great work they are doing.

Meteor 2.0 is a milestone release as it brings back Meteor Free deploy, powered by Meteor Cloud which includes MongoDB as well.

Free deploy

What does this mean for our community?

You can now deploy any Meteor app for free with a simple command. Yes, it’s as simple as that, just with one command and no configuration required:

meteor deploy myapp.meteorapp.com –free –mongo

If you run the above command on any Meteor app and it’ll be live in minutes with your MongoDB database. If you don’t have an app ready to be deployed, you can create a new one by running:

meteor create my-free-deploy-app

This is possible as Galaxy, the hosting offer inside Meteor cloud, is going to set up MongoDB for you, include its URI in your settings and then deploy your app in the desired meteorapp.com sub-domain.

So if you are building a Meteor app, your app should be always available for your peers or friends to check your progress. And the best, you are not going to spend any money.

Meteor 2.0 is a great improvement on your path to production that allows you for free to test your app in a cloud environment from day one. Without adding any costs to you.

Hot Module Replacement

Meteor 2.0 is not just about the addition of free deployment, we have also introduced the first version of Hot Module Replacement that will serve as a base for a much quicker feedback loop in development. React is the first framework to take advantage of Hot Module Replacement support in Meteor. We use React Refresh to provide the best experience possible.

Imagine a regular day, where you need to update your UI components probably more than 50 times. If your app takes 3 seconds to refresh you can spend a few minutes everyday just waiting. This is not the case anymore as with HMR support, your app is going to refresh immediately. What’s even better is React Refresh also keeps the state of your UI intact.

So if you need a few clicks and keystrokes to get to the desired state in your app, HMR will keep your app in this state while you are making changes to your code.

Also, Hot Module Replacement is not only available for React. A new package will bring the support for Blaze soon (check this PR to test it today).

We are not leaving anyone behind. This is very important for us and also for companies that are making money with Meteor in production.

Migration steps

As always you can migrate to the next version of Meteor by running:

meteor update

We don’t have any breaking change in this release. It’s a major version as we are delivering a lot of great features, and this release is just the first of many coming within 2.x.

Is it not great to have a great new feature without breaking changes? That was and always will be the idea with Meteor.

We love to avoid breaking changes, as we have more than 2,000 companies using Cloud/Galaxy who are running real businesses with Meteor. We value our clients a lot and we don’t want to break anything by requiring major rewrites, even when we release major new features. Sometimes this is going to be inevitable but not at this time.

You can check out our changelog as we are starting to deprecate some old packages.

If you want to see how easy it is to update to a new Meteor version check out this video. In this clip, we explain how to make updates on Meteor React tutorial and also I updated the tutorial app to Meteor 2.0, also added hot-module-replacement and dev-error-overlay.

If you like to see more videos as a way to learn, check How to Create an App channel, where I’m creating a platform (www.howtocreateanapp.dev) from scratch with Meteor without editing my mistakes, in a series called Making Of. New videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

How to Create an App is a project to teach web development in general (from beginners to experienced) as I cover topics that I’ve learned during 14 years of web development, all of which are still useful today. Meteor is a key piece in these videos as it is the most effective way to build apps with Javascript for production.

What is coming next

Meteor 2.1, 2.2, are coming in the next weeks as we have already many PRs close to an end.

You can check a few of them here:

Node.js 14; PRCordova 10; PRRemove deprecated code pre v1; PRTree-shaking; PRBlaze HMR; PRTutorials migration (help needed, watch here or read here);

Now with Meteor cloud out and 2.0 available, you should expect even more frequent releases and features coming. Our Roadmap is the best way for you to understand where we are going next.

To continue moving forward even faster we are looking for new developers to be part of our core team and of course, if you are already contributing to Meteor you have a head start.

Do you want to be the next Meteor core member? Understand what we are looking for here and how to apply.

Looking to the future

As you can see in the Roadmap we are already thinking about what is going to be Meteor 3.0.

We expect to have new features focusing on ease app development in Meteor 3.0 and probably some in Meteor 2.x as well, the first step is to review our feature requests one more time and define new priorities.

Maybe we should also have a new way of prioritization for new features, right now this repository with issues is not good enough in our opinion, the plan is to be even more open for feedbacks and collaboration. If we make changes in this process we are going to announce in the Forums and Slack as always.

We all had a tough year in 2020, we were able to help clients during this weird time, but we are really excited about 2021 and I hope you are as well.

Meteor 2.0 is here! was originally published in Meteor Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.