Global npm installs without sudo

Global installations with npm will fail on some distributions, if tried without sudo.

npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/lib/node_modules
npm ERR! Error: EACCES: permission denied, access '/usr/lib/node_modules'
npm ERR! Please try running this command again as root/Administrator.

There's another option to using sudo: Configure the prefix path.

Steps

Create a directory to use as the npm global installation root:

$ mkdir ~/npm

Set the npm prefix to the newly created directory:

$ npm config set prefix /home/me/npm

or, alternatively, edit ~/.npmrc and add the line prefix=/home/me/npm.

Verify it with:

$ npm config get prefix

It should output the prefix path, i.e. /home/me/npm. You can now do "user-global" installations without sudo and everything will go under that directory:

/home/me/npm
  bin
    bower -> ../lib/node_modules/bower/bin/bower
    harp -> ../lib/node_modules/harp/bin/harp
  lib
    node_modules
      bower
      harp

Finally, add the bin directory to the $PATH to be able to access the binaries from everywhere. For example, edit ~/.profile and add:

export PATH="/home/me/npm/bin/:$PATH"

or just create symbolic links to the necessary apps, in a directory already in the $PATH (i.e. /home/me/bin).

Yarn

The same thing can be achieved with yarn like this:

$ yarn config set prefix /home/me/yarn