npm install errors with Error: ENOENT, chmod

Ok it looks like NPM is using your .gitignore as a base for the .npmignore file, and thus ignores /lib. If you add a blank .npmignore file into the root of your application, everything should work.

A better, more explicit approach is to use an allow-list rather than a disallow-list, and use the "files" field in package.json to specify the files in your package.

[edit] - more info on this behaviour here: https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/developers#keeping-files-out-of-your-package

I ran into a similar problem,

npm cache clean

solved it.

This problem somehow arose for me on Mac when I was trying to run npm install -g bower. It was giving me a number of errors for not being able to find things like graceful-fs. I'm not sure how I installed npm originally, but it looks like perhaps it came down with node using homebrew. I first ran

brew uninstall node

This removed both node and npm from my path. From there I just reinstalled it

brew install node

When it completed I had node and npm on my path and I was able to run

rm -rf ~/.npmnpm install -g bower

This then installed bower successfully.

Updating the brew formulas and upgrading the installs didn't seem to work for me, I'm not sure why. The removal of the .npm folder was something that had worked for other people, and I had tried it without success. I did it this time just in case. Note also that neither of the following solved the problem for me, although it did for others:

npm cache cleansudo npm cache clean