CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxnode.jspermissionsnpm
lewis
lewis

Reputation: 858

NodeJS and npm without sudo on CentOS

On my box I have the Node and NPM binaries installed under /opt/node/bin. And the path is added properly.

node -v

and 

npm -v

work fine. When I create a file and run it with node all works as expected. However, when I run: 

npm init

the program fails to write package.json because it does not have write permission. I use:

sudo npm init

I get a file with owner and group of 0 0 and so any regular users cannot modify this file. I don't want to have to chown every file node/npm generates.

Is there way to get node/npm to run as a user in the same group as my other users and have write permissions to the same directories?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2547

Answers (1)

srquinn
srquinn

Reputation: 10501

You could simply chown your /opt/ directory and future calls to npm init will be owned by you. Better yet, work in your /home folder and make sure npm and node are in your $PATH. This way you don't need to worry about permissions for initializing a new node module. You will, however, need to use sudo to install packages globally. This is bad practice according to the maintainer of Nodejs:

http://howtonode.org/introduction-to-npm

I would follow along with his setup there. As he mentions, its very dangerous to give root access to a package manager.

Upvotes: 4

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