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 the ESLint 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.