Install npm Packages Without Sudo

npm installs packages locally within your projects by default. You can also install packages globally (e.g. npm install -g ) (useful for command-line apps). However the downside of this is that you need to be root (or use sudo) to be able to install globally.

Below are the steps to install packages globally for a given user in Linux or Mac

1. Create a directory for global packages

mkdir "${HOME}/.npm-packages"

2. Tell npm where to store globally installed packages

npm config set prefix "${HOME}/.npm-packages"

3. Ensure npm will find installed binaries and man pages

NPM_PACKAGES="${HOME}/.npm-packages"

export PATH="$PATH:$NPM_PACKAGES/bin"

# Preserve MANPATH if you already defined it somewhere in your config.
# Otherwise, fall back to `manpath` so we can inherit from `/etc/manpath`.
export MANPATH="${MANPATH-$(manpath)}:$NPM_PACKAGES/share/man"

If you’re using fish, add the following to ~/.config/fish/config.fish

set NPM_PACKAGES "$HOME/.npm-packages"

set PATH $PATH $NPM_PACKAGES/bin

set MANPATH $NPM_PACKAGES/share/man $MANPATH  

If you have erased your MANPATH by mistake, you can restore it by running set -Ux MANPATH (manpath -g) $MANPATH once. Do not put this command in your config.fish.

Note:

If you are running macOS, the .bashrc file may not yet exist, and the terminal will be obtaining its environment parameters from another file, such as .profile or .bash_profile. These files also reside in the user’s home folder. In this case, simply adding the following line to them will instruct Terminal to also load the .bashrc file: source ~/.bashrc

Read more about startup files in linux