Can I use other node.js libraries in Meteor?

Question

I was playing around with an idea and wanted to get some json from another site. I found with node.js people seem to use http.get to accomplish this however I discovered it wasn't that easy in Meteor. Is there another way to do this or a way to access http so I can call get? I wanted an interval that could collect data from an external source to augment the data the clients would interact with.

Answer 1

Looks like you can get at require this way:

var http = __meteor_bootstrap__.require('http');

Note that this'll probably only work on the server, so make sure it's protected with a check for Meteor.is_server.

Answer 2

This is much easier now with Meteor.http. First run meteor add http, then you can do something like this:

// common code
stats = new Meteor.Collection('stats');

// server code: poll service every 10 seconds, insert JSON result in DB.
Meteor.setInterval(function () {
  var res = Meteor.http.get(SOME_URL);
  if (res.statusCode === 200)
    stats.insert(res.data);
}, 10000);