prevent meteor from downloading package updates

Question

I have a meteor app on my laptop (where I do development work on the app), and I would like to be able to work with it and/or give demos of it in situations where I do not have an internet connection.

How can I prevent meteor from automatically trying to download updates to packages when I run it, so that I can run my app without issues in an "offline" situation?

Note that this is different from the client (browser) being "offline" in the sense that it can't connect to the server. In this situation, the client and server are on the same machine and the client does have access to the server. But the machine is disconnected from the internet, so that attempts to automatically download package updates will incur at least a delay, if not errors, and I'd like to prevent that.

Answer 1

Use METEOR_OFFLINE_CATALOG environment var for that. But I would suggest not to set it up permanently, but rather to use it once.

So if you run meteor like this: METEOR_OFFLINE_CATALOG=1 meteor it shouldn't update any packages or meteor releases.