I ask because the account system meteor has is in my opinion one of the easiest to use and learn.
I’ve tried passport.js but it’s so messy so I am considering using meteor as my backend.
I would like to hear if this would be a good practice or if theres a way to use meteor’s account system from an external npm package?
I think in meteor 1.5, which should be coming out soon, it will be installable through npm. If your backend is meteor you’ll still be tied in to the ecosystem though (Mongo, which isn’t a problem with passport).
I don’t think meteor has the best support for building APIs, there are a few packages for REST APIs but since meteor’s default is more RPC style with meteor methods don’t expect lot’s of support. Plus, since meteor is yet another layer on top of node, some performance degradation is expected, especially with all the stuff going on that you wouldn’t be using. You’re better off with something like express for a simple (rest) api imho.
That being said, if your use case is simple I would “go full meteor”, I personally don’t mind mongodb and the accounts system is really one of the easiest out there, scaling can be expensive though.