npm install from git repo fails with ENOENT

I am trying to install one of my own packages as follows

npm install --save gfarrell/state.js

and I'm getting the following errors (full log here):

npm ERR! addLocal Could not install gfarrell/state.js
npm ERR! Error: ENOENT, stat 'gfarrell/state.js'
npm ERR! If you need help, you may report this *entire* log,
npm ERR! including the npm and node versions, at:
npm ERR!     <http://github.com/npm/npm/issues>

npm ERR! System Darwin 13.4.0
npm ERR! command "node" "/usr/local/bin/npm" "install" "--save" "gfarrell/state.js"
npm ERR! cwd /Users/gideon/Code/PresenceMonitor
npm ERR! node -v v0.10.28
npm ERR! npm -v 1.4.10
npm ERR! path gfarrell/state.js
npm ERR! code ENOENT
npm ERR! errno 34
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR!     /Users/gideon/Code/PresenceMonitor/npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0

Now I've tried various solutions including:

  • npm cache clean
  • sudo npm cache clean
  • rm -rf ~/.npm
  • sudo npm install --save gfarrell/state.js
  • npm install --save git://github.com/gfarrell/state.js.git

but nothing has changed the error output. I can't see anything wrong with the module's package.json, and I haven't added anything to my local package.json either. I actually tried installing this package on an earlier version and it worked fine, so I just don't understand what is going wrong.

Needless to say, it's all rather frustrating. Is there something else going on that I'm just not seeing?

This is most probably an authentication issue. You should add --verbose to the install command to se more output. You should see this line in your console output when running with verbose on:

npm ERR! git clone git@github.com:gfarrell/state.js Permission denied (publickey).

Check if you are authenticated to Github using the following command:

ssh -T git@github.com

When you are authenticated correctly you should see the following output:

Hi gfarrell! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Github has a great guide on SSH keys as well as how to solve common errors.

Fix your Github authentication and the npm install will start working.

I had a similar issue myself. Because the last "ok" line of the verbose output started with "addRemoteGit", I traced the issue to a function named addRemoteGit in the npm source file cache.js (in v1.4.9, it has now been moved into add-remote-git.js). By adding a call to log.verbose(p), I found out npm could not write to ~/.npm/_git-remotes/.

Basically it was a permission problem: my ~/.npm directory contained files & directories owned by root. I solved the issue by simply running:

sudo find ~/.npm -exec chown $USER:$USER {} \;