Setting up your development environment

You'll want to make sure you have Meteor installed (of course), and you will need a default project file structure set up. You can either use the Setting up your project file structure recipe from earlier in this chapter, or create a brand new Meteor project using the meteor create [...] command.

This recipe assumes that you have some Mongo collections and/or some kinds of user accounts set up. If you don't have a collection added, you may want to add one just for testing purposes. To do so, create a file named [project root]/both/model.js and enter the following line of code:

testCollection = new Mongo.Collection('testCollection');

With a project in place and at least one Mongo collection to monitor, we're ready to start developing and debugging!

First, we want to make sure that the insecure and autopublish packages are installed, which is usually the case with a default Meteor project.

This comes in very handy when you're building your app, as you have instant access to your collections and user account profiles.

The following line is all that's needed to install a package:

$ meteor add msavin:mongol

This tells Meteor to go and find the msavin:mongol package, with all of its dependencies, and add the package to your project. This is a third-party package, and more details on the package can be found at https://atmospherejs.com/msavin/mongol.

Once installed, you can access it on your browser page by the Ctrl + M shortcut. Under the hood, the mongol package is monitoring for any collections, specifically filtering user-account-related collections into the Account tab. Other than that, all collections are treated the same, and this interface just simplifies your debugging/development process when you need to see what's going on inside your collections.

Mongol is very new but it is getting better all the time. You can read about all it's current features and preview upcoming features by visiting https://github.com/msavin/Mongol.