Issues with meteor app on vagrant share

Question

I have a vagrant VM (virtualbox) setup with meteor. My host and guest are both Ubuntu. The VM contains a vboxfs share folder setup through the Vagrantfile. The behavior I am noticing is similar to a NFS mount.

I am able to create a meteor project in this shared folder, but when I run the project I get errors pointing to mongodb.

If I follow instructions on https://github.com/pixelhandler/vagrant-dev-env/blob/master/README.md my app works just fine.

Upon further investigation it seems that MongoDB does not work on NFS shares, http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/NFS

Has anyone else run in to this issue? and if so, have you figured out a (non-rsync) solution?

I plan to send link of this question to 10gen, perhaps someone from their team can answer it.

Answer 1

Not sure what Mongo's plans are re running on NFS / vboxfs, but you could work around this by running your own MongoDB not in the shared folder (eg, use the ubuntu mongodb package). Use the MONGO_URL environment variable to tell meteor where to connect. If you pass this variable, meteor will not try to start MongoDB in the meteor project directory.

Answer 2

You can move the data dir somewhere inside the VM, and use a symlink from the vagrant folder:

cd /vagrant/.meteor/local
ln -s ~/db/

This means the data will not be shared, but you probably want it git ignored anyway.

(https://grahamrhay.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/running-meteor-in-a-vagrant-virtualbox/)

Answer 3

grahamrhay's solution would not work with the vagrant box started on Windows. There is no way to make symbolic links on windows for vagrant, at least not for administrator accounts.