I really love the Meteor development environment but when I began prototyping my app for a production-like deployment, I was surprised to see that there appears to be a hard dependency on a running MongoDB server and a mail server.
The docs don’t say anything about these dependencies or requirements. Is it not possible to deploy to production a simple Meteor app with just an Front-End & Back-End (no data store or mail server, etc)?
It should be, you just need to remove any dependencies that would use mail functionality and database. Beware of dependencies that depend on those two things.
If you create your app with --minimal you get no MongoDB and no email.
You also get no DDP - so no pub/sub, Meteor methods, etc. You can always add back those parts you want, although beware dependencies as @storyteller says!
You don’t need a mail server if you never use those features (as in: Call mail functions from code) - my own app is running just fine without me removing anything from the default Meteor project.