~/.npm and ~/tmp permissions for non sudo installs (e.g.: virtualenv)

[yuvilio]

I ran into permission issues when trying to install this using virtualenv but found out what it was.

I got this error

OSError: Command ". nenv1/bin/activate...h && deactivate_node" failed with error code 3

When I ran it with --verbose, it turned out that it failed to write to my ~/.npm directory and ~/tmp directories. both were owned by root. for example the expanded error for the latter was:

..
npm ERR! addLocal Could not install .
npm ERR! Error: EACCES, mkdir '/home/yuvilio/tmp/npm-9739'
npm ERR! { [Error: EACCES, mkdir '/home/yuvilio/tmp/npm-9739'] errno: 3, code: 'EACCES', path: '/home/yuvilio/
tmp/npm-9739' }

..

I think this was because I had a node install from Ubuntu and ran sudo npm install which made those directories not accessible. When I switched to virtualenv and ran nodeenv, the npm install was blocked.

The fix was to make ~/.npm and ~/tmp writable. I went recursive (-R) for extra assurance:

sudo chown -fR myusername:myusername ~/.npm ~/tmp

The install then went through. Might be worth noting in the documentation somewhere.

[yuvilio]

Closing issue as its just a comment

[ekalinin]

Thanks for comment.
Yes, i'll try to add this note to documentation.

[channely]

Thanks ! !

[waveywhite]

There is a problem here. Running sudo npm install -g shoudn't be writing files into the current user's home folder. I'm running into this problem in particular on system with /home mounted over NFS. In this situation NFS should be set up to disallow someone creating files as root but that breaks npm install.

setting the tmp configuration doesn't seem to sort this out, it insists on writing files to ~/tmp. The way I made it work in the end was to symbolically link /tmp to ~/tmp and ~/.npm.

[eatonphil]

Good call on the symbolic link, waveywhite! Thanks!

[ekalinin]

Good call on the symbolic link, waveywhite! Thanks!

You're welcome!