Postinstall of Bower dependencies breaks with sudo

[phated]

When running sudo npm install cram, the command errors with:

npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/cram
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/cram

> cram@0.7.6 postinstall /Users/phated/test/node_modules/cram
> bower install

bower ESUDO         Cannot be run with sudo

Additional error details:
Since bower is a user command, there is no need to execute it with superuser permissions.
If you're having permission errors when using bower without sudo, please spend a few minutes learning more about how your system should work and make any necessary repairs.

http://www.joyent.com/blog/installing-node-and-npm
https://gist.github.com/isaacs/579814

You can however run a command with sudo using --allow-root option
npm ERR! weird error 1
npm ERR! not ok code 0

I think the Bower install should happen on prepublish, as per https://npmjs.org/doc/misc/npm-scripts.html#NOTE-INSTALL-SCRIPTS-ARE-AN-ANTIPATTERN

[unscriptable]

Thanks @phated. Even though "prepublish" (the word) makes no sense to me, that seems like the correct thing to do.

[phated]

It looks like your .gitignore has amd_modules/ in it. If you don't have a .npmignore, npm uses the .gitignore to generate it, so amd_modules/ isn't in the installed package.

[phated]

You should be able to use npm pack to test the prepublish command and then unzip to make sure it has everything.

[unscriptable]

amd_modules is ignored on purpose. the prepublish script should install them. isn't that working on your machine?

[phated]

prepublish happens when you publish the module. prepublish will be executed and amd_modules included in the zip file stored in NPM.

[unscriptable]

this conversation is confusing me! :)

if we don't want to publish amd_modules, we want them to be installed at npm install time, what is the correct method? cc @bcavalier @scothis

[phated]

The correct method is to not rely on the bower install and use github urls in the NPM dependencies.

[scothis]

I'm confused as to why you're using bower to fetch dependencies for an npm package... Why not just use npm's dependency resolution?

[phated]

Why are you against bundling the bower dependencies in the npm published package?

To test the npm package, you can run npm pack