Mongo geospatial index and Meteor

Yes, you can use the MongoDB geospatial index within Meteor, and you can create that index from within your Meteor app too.

- Geospatial Search

I'm using the $within operator below, as opposed to the $near operator mentioned above, but this still applies:

Meteor.publish('places', function(box) {    return Places.find({ loc : { $within : { $box : box }}});});

Reminder: These kinds of geo queries are only available on the server (currently).

- Creating a Geospatial Index from within Meteor (rather than in a MongoDB shell)

Places._ensureIndex({ loc : "2d" });

e.g. You could use the above in your bootstrap.js.

Also, you'll probably want to put your ensureIndex in Meteor.startup, or perhaps when you're inserting some initial data.

Warning: As mentioned here, the above method of calling ensureIndex is a work around for want of an official way to call it, so please expect that this might change.

Update: now reflects changes in Meteor 0.5.0, see @Dror's comment below.

Yes, I think you can.

On the server side, Meteor delegates find/update/.. into node-mongo-native call. You can take a look the code in packages/mongo-livedata/mongo_driver.js. And as I know, node-mongo-native supports geospatial index.