Ignoring files in a Meteor JS project directory

Question

I have a JavaScript based library I'd like to include in a Meteor JS application. The library source code is hosted in a Git repository and I'd like to include the repo as a submodule in my own source code repo for my Meteor app. However, I don't need a majority of the files included processed by Meteor, only a few select ones. Indeed Meteor barfs with "Error: Couldn't parse .. um .. some HTML file, on some line. sorry" when it sees many of the files in the submodule.

Is there a way to selectively whitelist or blacklist files for inclusion into the Meteor app inside the project directory? Apart from creating a Smart Package, are there ways in which I could include external resources such as Git submodules inside my Meteor app project directory.

Update: as explained in the related question of "How to create a package", if you create a Smart Package into a local Git checkout of Meteor itself, you get the hot-reload behaviour for the code in the package.

Answer 1

In addition to the /public directory that jonathan mentions, Meteor also ignores any directories that begin with a "." - so you could create a .submodules directory and put the files in there and Meteor won't load them.

This is probably preferable to having them in /public since, well, they're not public.

Answer 2

Update: in the upcoming release of Meteor (0.6.5) there is a private directory in which you can put files that are inaccessible to the client and not automatically loaded on the server. The Assets global object and API allows you to read these files.