webapp

Documentation of Meteor's `webapp` package.

The webapp package is what lets your Meteor app serve content to a web browser. It is included in the meteor-base set of packages that is automatically added when you run meteor create. You can easily build a Meteor app without it - for example if you wanted to make a command-line tool that still used the Meteor package system and DDP.

This package also allows you to add handlers for HTTP requests. This lets other services access your app’s data through an HTTP API, allowing it to easily interoperate with tools and frameworks that don’t yet support DDP.

webapp exposes the connect API for handling requests through WebApp.connectHandlers. Here’s an example that will let you handle a specific URL:

// Listen to incoming HTTP requests (can only be used on the server).
WebApp.connectHandlers.use('/hello', (req, res, next) => {
  res.writeHead(200);
  res.end(`Hello world from: ${Meteor.release}`);
});

WebApp.connectHandlers.use([path], handler) has two arguments:

path - an optional path field. This handler will only be called on paths that match this string. The match has to border on a / or a .. For example, /hello will match /hello/world and /hello.world, but not /hello_world.

handler - this is a function that takes three arguments:

  • req - a Node.js IncomingMessage object with some extra properties. This argument can be used to get information about the incoming request.
  • res - a Node.js ServerResponse object. Use this to write data that should be sent in response to the request, and call res.end() when you are done.
  • next - a function. Calling this function will pass on the handling of this request to the next relevant handler.
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