How to fix npm install permissions on Ubuntu

Learn by elaboration

Back up your computer.

On the command line, in your home directory, create a directory for global installations:

mkdir ~/.npm-global

Configure npm to use the new directory path:

npm config set prefix '~/.npm-global'

In your preferred text editor, open or create a ~/.profile file and add this line:

export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH

On the command line, update your system variables:

source ~/.profile

To test your new configuration, install a package globally without using sudo:

npm install -g jshint

Instead of steps 3-5, you can use the corresponding ENV variable (e.g. if you don’t want to modify ~/.profile):

NPM_CONFIG_PREFIX=~/.npm-global