docsmith dependency problem

[joncamfield]

I'm hitting this when trying to install docsmith:

npm ERR! code 1
npm ERR! Command failed: /usr/bin/git clone -q git://github.com/contentascode/metalsmith.git /home/jon/.npm/_cacache/tmp/git-clone-85e29d7b
npm ERR! /home/jon/.npm/_cacache/tmp/git-clone-85e29d7b/.git: Permission denied
npm ERR! 

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /home/jon/.npm/_logs/2018-03-01T17_16_19_507Z-debug.log

The relevant log crop seems to be:

63 verbose cwd /home/jon
64 verbose Linux 4.13.0-36-generic
65 verbose argv "/usr/bin/node" "/usr/bin/npm" "i" "-g" "docsmith"
66 verbose node v6.12.3
67 verbose npm  v5.6.0
68 error code 1
69 error Command failed: /usr/bin/git clone -q git://github.com/contentascode/metalsmith.git /home/jon/.npm/$
69 error /home/jon/.npm/_cacache/tmp/git-clone-85e29d7b/.git: Permission denied
70 verbose exit [ 1, true ]

npm version:

{ npm: '5.6.0',
ares: '1.10.1-DEV',
http_parser: '2.7.0',
icu: '58.2',
modules: '48',
node: '6.12.3',
openssl: '1.0.2n',
uv: '1.15.0',
v8: '5.1.281.111',
zlib: '1.2.11' }

[joncamfield]

(fwiw, I am sudo'ing these commands)

[joncamfield]

Running install sans sudo gives some potentially more useful errors before it gets to complaining about not having sudo:

jon@think:~$ npm i -g docsmith
npm WARN deprecated coffee-script@1.12.7: CoffeeScript on NPM has moved to "coffeescript" (no hyphen)
npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/lib/node_modules
npm WARN pnpm-shrinkwrap@3.4.0 requires a peer of pnpm-logger@^0.6.2 but none is installed. You must install peer dependencies yourself.

[jmatsushita]

The default install of npm and nodejs on linux doesn't respect some conventions. The best way to approach this AFAIK is to use nvm which @poser has generously documented during his own experiment: https://gitlab.com/ttc/currasco#install-dependencies

[poser]

The default install of npm and nodejs on linux doesn't respect some conventions. The best way to approach this AFAIK is to use nvm which @poser has generously documented during his own experiment

A public version of that README is available here:
https://gitlab.com/slipjack/currasco-eti#install-dependencies