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Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Not sails-specific, but

sudo npm -g install sails

Why do so many projects require sudo? Why are we writing to any area which would require root write privileges? Why do we not default to just writing stuff in to user home directories and patching off that?

Possibly naive question, but one which is increasingly bugging me.

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The -g option in NPM means "install globally" (i.e. system wide) instead of in this projects modules directory. You will always need root privs for that, for any module.

Without the -g option sudo is usually not required.

That depends on how you install your node/npm. For nvm installs the default is ~/.npm which doesn't require root privileges but is user specific.

As a best practice you could use a package.json file [1], IMHO.

[1] https://npmjs.org/doc/json.html

You can always change the destination directory. I usually store my project dependencies locally, so this command works fine:

npm install sails

This command would store the libs in ./node_modules directory [1].

[1] http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/03/23/npm-1-0-global-vs-local-in...

I think on github https://github.com/isaacs/npm/issues is the right place to ask this, or tho add a feature request.

"-g" ist for global installations and you want a "-l" for user local installation.

-l does not mean "local". -l means "--long" and has no relevance to the install command.

Local is the default state. If you want to force non-globalness, you can do `--no-global`

If you want to install npm for user-specific installations (such as when you don't want to require root access when installing an npm module, or that the computer is shared), you can download the NodeJS tarball, and run

    ./configure --prefix=/home/user/local

Which should install into your ~/local directory after running 'make && make install'.

My understanding is that npm defaults to putting its install directory somewhere that requires root access. So you see this with the -g option since that puts it in the root npm directory.

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