Error when trying to install firebase with NPM

Question

I am trying to (re)install Firebase, however, when I run sudo npm install -g firebase-tools the following error shows up:

I have no idea what is wrong, it used to work well a few month ago.

Answer 1

You try running

npm cache clean

and then trying to install again.

If the error is not lost try below

Have you tried installing homebridge with the --unsafe-perm option?

sudo npm install -g --unsafe-perm homebridge

If npm detects it is running as root it drops to a non-privileged user which then doesn't have permissions to write to /root/.node-gyp. The --unsafe-perm option stops it from changing user.

nvm doesn't have this problem when not using sudo because it stores everything under the current users' home directory.