When dealing with NPM Permissions, often times it can be tempting to resort to installing modules as root (sudo), especially when under tight time constraints; where troubleshooting such issues will only serve to delay your progress.

Admittedly, I have been guilty of this more often than I care to admit. That said, being as I always have the Broken Windows Theory in the back of my mind, I knew this workaround needed to be resolved as soon as I had a moment to dig into it a bit more.

Previously, I had followed the instructions from docs.npmjs; however, they focus more on installations of global dependencies, rather than local dependencies. Fortunately, after a few quick searches, it became apparent that by simply changing permissions to the ~/.npm directory, this issue could easily be resolved as, all that is needed is to change the owner of the ~/.npm directory to the current user (as opposed to root).

To do so, simply run the following:

Likewise, you can use your username explicitly; e.g.:

And with that, the issue can safely be resolved, allowing you to run npm install as expected without having to fallback to using sudo.

Tags: node, npm, npm permissions, sudo