README: remove sudo from "sudo npm install"?

[benatkin]

The creator of npm back in 2010 recommended against using sudo, and AFAIK that's still the policy. http://howtonode.org/introduction-to-npm

How about making the instructions simply say npm install -g ionic instead of sudo npm install -g ionic?

Besides being preferable, it's also more reliable instructions, because if the user's setup requires sudo and they don't use sudo, they'll get an error right away, where as if the user's setup doesn't require sudo and they use sudo, it will go ahead and install as root, which will make their permissions in their npm directory inconsistent.

[ashconnell]

It does depend on how the user has installed npm in the first place.

[benatkin]

I asked in #npm on freenode and at least one person there was using sudo for global modules. I also noticed that cordova also suggests installing with sudo. Maybe it's just better to keep it how it is, for consistency's sake. I know on linux depending on what the box (or container) does either can be acceptable from a security standpoint (if the box has both an app and a database on it, it's probably better to keep files local to the app). I'm a homebrew user on OS X so it works to install without sudo. Unfortunately it's hard to see what a fresh install on OS X with just the .pkg from http://nodejs.org/ would be like. It might require sudo by default.

It is possible to configure an npm installation in a directory that requires sudo to install global modules in a different directory, but there doesn't seem to be many good resources showing how to do this on google. So I figure that a lot of people are using sudo to install global modules right now.

When this changes, maybe then the docs should be updated to remove sudo.

[ionitron-bot]

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