Hi everyone!

Exciting news! Today we are releasing Meteor 0.9.0 and with it the official Meteor packaging system, including Isobuild (more on this in a future blog post) and the Meteor Package Server. Update your project to it by typing meteor update as usual.

For those of you on deadline with your apps, here are the highlights:

meteor update will now intelligently update all of the packages in your app, not just core packages from the Meteor distribution.

will now intelligently update all of the packages in your app, not just core packages from the Meteor distribution. You can meteor add and meteor remove any package directly from the command line, not just core packages. You don't need to use mrt for these things anymore. You can even meteor search for packages, even while offline (though you'll have to go online to download new packages that you don't have cached locally).

and any package directly from the command line, not just core packages. You don't need to use for these things anymore. You can even for packages, even while offline (though you'll have to go online to download new packages that you don't have cached locally). Proper single loading. Meteor uses a powerful constraint solver to find a mutually compatible set of package versions, so that it doesn’t have to wastefully ship a dozen different versions of underscore to the browser.

to the browser. Plus a bonus: live CSS injection. During development, when you change your app’s CSS but not any other files, the CSS will be updated in all open browser tabs without a page refresh. This works even if you are using a CSS preprocessor such as LESS or Sass.

When you update to 0.9.0, if you’ve been using Meteorite, you will be prompted to upgrade your project using mrt migrate-app . And atmospherejs.com has been updated to point at the official package server – check it out!

We’ve migrated all of the packages from the Meteorite servers over to the new Meteor Package Server. There are a few packages that were not able to be automatically migrated; for those, Meteorite will continue running for a while longer. There is some documentation of the processon this Hackpad and more information about the release in History.md. Thanks to Github users Cangit, dandv, ImtiazMajeed, MaximDubrovin, mitar, mquandalle, rcy, RichardLitt, thatneat, and twhy for contributing patches to this release, in addition to the many package developers that put in hard work testing and migrating their packages.

We know that many of you have been waiting for this release for a long time and we wanted to get it into your hands as soon as possible. So we’re releasing early and often, and you’ll find some rough edges, including help text that isn’t as polished as usual, commands that could have clearer options, and some slowness on startup. These things will be tightened up over the next few releases.

Hope you’re getting psyched up for Meteor 1.0, and don’t forget to star Meteor on Github!

ps. Special thanks to Tom Coleman and the rest of Percolate Studio, who not only built the original Meteor package system and the gorgeous frontend at atmospherejs.com that we all use to browse Meteor packages, but also did so much of the hard work necessary to make the new system a reality. The community also owes a debt of gratitude to Mike Bannister who with Tom Coleman created Meteorite and Atmosphere.