Ubuntu create-react-app fails with permission denied

This problem on a Mac

Working from Reactjs's Getting Started documentation.

The Environment

• OSX Mojave 10.14.3
• NodeJS v10.15.0

The Error

• Command

  npx create-react-app my-app
  

• Output

  Unhandled rejection Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/Users/caseywise/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/ae/73'instal
  

The Fix

recursively change owner:group on caseywise's NPM preferences directory

sudo chown -R caseywise:staff '/Users/caseywise/.npm/'

TL;TR

Run:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER '/home/REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_USERNAME/.npm/'

On Linux OS NPM and NodeJS are installed globally with sudo and the owner of that files is the root and usually a user can only read/execute that packages. When NPM is stalled a ~/.npm/ folder is created by the root. By running create-react-app you are executing the command as user and create-react-app is trying to modify something in the ~/.npm/ directory which is owned by the root and not to current user. You need to change the owner of that directory to you, so you can modify it without sudo privileges.

Often similar thing happens when you install NPM package with sudo e.g. sudo npm install <package> --save. Again the newly installed package in owned by the root and for example when you try to update/modufy/delete your project without sudo infrnt of NPM you will have similar permission error. In these cases navigate to your project directory and change its owner by running:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER .

New way of installation will resolve the issue.

According to the latest react documentation follow below steps to create react app

npx create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npm start

Note(from ReactJS Team): If you've previously installed create-react-app globally via npm install -g create-react-app, we recommend you uninstall the package using npm uninstall -g create-react-app to ensure that npx always uses the latest version.

Refer official documentation: https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/getting-started