Why does Meteorite say “smart.json changed..” every time?

Question

My small meteor project has this smart.json

{
  "packages": {
    "iron-router": {},
    "handlebar-helpers": {},
    "jqueryui": {},
    "npm": {}
  }
}

Every time I start the server with mrt run, I get a "smart.json changed.." message, and it reinstalls all the packages (or so it seems). I don't think I've done anything to change smart.json. Quite recently I think the atmosphere site has been very unstable and sometimes the packages never load, so I can't start the server.

Is there anything I can do to prevent the install?

Answer 1

It appears that I have found the answer. My smart.json file had some packages with no version specified. When thats the case, I believe that meteorite always checks to see if there are new package versions available, which makes a lot of sense. When I added a specific version to the package, the behavior stopped.

E.G. changing from:

"jqueryui": { }

to:

"jqueryui": {
  "version": "1.10.4"
}

Answer 2

Meteorite will say smart.json changed and reinstall everything if it notices another file smart.lock does not exist or is different from smart.json.

If the files are different is assumes smart.json has changed and will reinstall what would be different.

If you check your project directory make sure you can see a smart.lock file and if you don't see one after you run mrt check whether mrt has adequate permissions to create one.