Installation failed on ubuntu 14.04 node 6.9.1 npm 3.10.8

[viyatgandhi]

Installation failed on ubuntu 14.04 node 6.9.1 npm 3.10.8

[paixaop]

Thank you for posting the issue and solution!
I'll update the docs

[LewdEwe-ErikWallace]

I think I found a solution to this and it appears to be due to user permissions. I usually do my server admin by logging in as root with SSH keys. I eventually found these web pages:

npm/npm#3497
https://www.bountysource.com/issues/28871797-installing-latest-on-debian-problems-with-node-gyp

From these I tried the idea of using the --unsafe-perm flag and the sodium package seemed to install without problems. So my command usage was:

npm install sodium --save --unsafe-perm

[LewdEwe-ErikWallace]

I tried installing the sodium module on a DigitalOcean server with Ubuntu 16.04 and it failed with a very similar or identical error as reported above by @viyatgandhi. There are a whole string errors, all about macro expansion as far as I can see.

Before the node-gyp build started there was also a warning about something else, but I don't know if it matters:

npm WARN lifecycle [email protected]~preinstall: cannot run in wd %s %s (wd=%s) [email protected] node install.js --preinstall /home/test/server/node_modules/.staging/sodium-4fff6169

Here is a link to the console output from the entire node-gyp build:

https://gist.github.com/LewdEwe-ErikWallace/e85eef6ffa14d3a8e98401a05d89866d