Recommended way to require Node.js modules in Meteor

Question

I'm hacking my way through my first Meteor app, and I've opened a bit of a rabbit hole in trying to connect to S3. I've installed awssum using meteorite, but it appears that I need to install the Node.js module of the same name to actually work through the examples. I'll eventually deploy my app to Heroku, and I'd like to be able to package my dependencies with my code. Googling a bit I've found a number of ways to do this, and I'm wondering which is close to being the best practice:

• install the package I need in /public (https://github.com/possibilities/meteor-node-modules) (seems risky)
• hack the buildpack I'm using (https://github.com/oortcloud/heroku-buildpack-meteorite) to require the node packages I need
• Deploy my project as a Node module itself, thereby allowing dependencies (https://github.com/matb33/heroku-meteor-npm)
• bundle your project, untar it, and install in the created node_modules dir (Recommended way to use node.js modules with meteor)

Which route should I take?

Answer 1

We are closing in on a release that interoperates w/ NPM packages. See Avi's writeup on meteor-talk.

He also gave a tech talk at last month's Devshop previewing the work, using S3 as the example: http://youtu.be/kA-QB9rQCq8