How to install NPM package in a home directory (PyCharm)

I don’t like to install things as a root user. If it’s possible to install something in my home directory, why not use it?

I use PyCharm for programming and for example to validate JavaScript code it needs http://eslint.org package. Let’s install ESLint in home directory and make it globally accessible.

First, we need to tell NPM that it should install everything in ~/.npm directory.

npm config set prefix '~/.npm'

Now every time when you install NPM package using -g option it will install it in ~/.npm directory. You don’t need the root access to do it. All executables will be in ~/.npm/bin directory. For example if I install ESLint using npm install -g eslint command then it will be possible to run eslint command from terminal using full path:

~/.npm/bin/eslint

It’s inconvenient, right? It’s better to be able to use just eslint command. To achieve that we need to modify ~/.bash_profile file. Find in this file line which starts with PATH= and add ~/.npm/bin at the end of the line. In my ~/.bash_profile file it looks like this:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/bin:~/.npm/bin

If the line with PATH doesn’t exist then you can add it:

PATH=$PATH:~/.npm/bin

Now you need to apply changes.

source ~/.bash_profile

And it’s done. You should be able to run eslint without specifying the full path to the file.

Quick tip about PyCharm. PyCharm needs a full path to the ESLint directory, not to ESLint executable file. In settings you need to use ~/.npm/lib/node_modules/eslint path.