Meteor 2.6 and MongoDB 5

Hello, everyone.

Meteor 2.6 main highlight is the usage of the newest node-mongodb-driver and the support of MongoDB 5, but there is also room in this announcement for Cordova, so stay with me here!

Mongo 5 and Node.js driver Upgrade

Our engineering team has been working hard to match MongoDB's last release which brings a lot of cool features in security and stability. It has been Meteor’s core value to be up to date with major LTS releases of its tech stack. It’s also worth mentioning MongoDB’s deadline to replace M0 free clusters and M2/M5 shared clusters with MongoDB 5 is mid-February 2022. If you are using any of these clusters you need to upgrade your Meteor app to 2.6 before this happens or your app will stop working. With all that being said, this posed a big requirement for applications, which the main feature is the upgrade to the newly released Node.js Mongo driver (4.x).

We have successfully launched our first beta on January 07th, 2022, which gave a reasonable amount of time to prepare and start the migration. Our beta versions are always good material; we also use them in our apps! You should give them a try as soon as we announce in our Forums or Slack (#beta-feedback).

But in summary, what does this mean for production applications? Almost no work is required; we've maintained API compatibility with previous Meteor versions — also, the migration path is so well detailed that it might seem like an actual walk in the park with our Migration Guide to help.

But what for hobby applications? This means you can use MongoDB Atlas instances in the free plan, even when upgrading to Mongo 5 instances.

Meteor is now shipping by default with MongoDB 5 embedded for your development environment. You can use all the latest and greatest from MongoDB without all the hassle of setting a local configuration of Mongo. Just meteor create and meteor start and voilá, you can start building a whole new company business!

There are a lot of internal changes, especially with the Node.js driver, so if you are using rawCollection directly, please make sure to read all our Changelog.

New Launch Screens key on iOS for Cordova Apps

With this release, we are deprecating a set of legacy keys regarding launch screens — that map you set in your mobile-config.js file, remember? Don't you? Check our docs here.

This introduces support for new storyboard compatible keys and Dark Mode launch screens! You can set one for each theme.

Public Roadmap

We’ve also taken the opportunity to update our Public Roadmap. In this document, you will find all our public goals and how Meteor will evolve, as well as how the core team focus will be.

This document should also serve as a guideline for the community to create Pull Requests and Discussions around topics that are between our priorities. Of course, we will also discuss other topics but ideally, we want to stay focused on the Roadmap. With community feedback, we can apply changes to the roadmap as well.

You can check it out now, here.

Start using Meteor 2.6

To update your app, just run meteor update.

We encourage you to read the complete Changelog described here.

Thank you to all the contributors involved in this release. Your feedback and help are always important.