Mkdir permission

[stefandevo]

Hi, thanks for this. I used this to run claude code runners on my self hosted instances. Recently (this weekend) it started failing with an error that it could not create a specific directly because of limited permissions. We did have that issue before. Any idea how i can fix this. Do i need to reinstall everything again under root for example?

[stefandevo]

For your reference, this what I saw in the Github Actions runners log:

npm ERR! code EACCES
npm ERR! syscall mkdir
npm ERR! path /usr/local/lib/node_modules
npm ERR! errno -13
npm ERR! Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules'
npm ERR!  [Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules'] {
npm ERR!   errno: -13,
npm ERR!   code: 'EACCES',
npm ERR!   syscall: 'mkdir',
npm ERR!   path: '/usr/local/lib/node_modules'
npm ERR! }
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! The operation was rejected by your operating system.
npm ERR! It is likely you do not have the permissions to access this file as the current user
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! If you believe this might be a permissions issue, please double-check the
npm ERR! permissions of the file and its containing directories, or try running
npm ERR! the command again as root/Administrator.
npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /home/runner-8/.npm/_logs/2025-07-22T05_30_56_827Z-debug-0.log
Error: Process completed with exit code 243.

I fixed it now on the VPS by running:

# Create and set proper ownership for npm global directories
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/lib/node_modules
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin

# Change ownership to allow all runner users to write
sudo chgrp -R staff /usr/local/lib/node_modules /usr/local/bin
sudo chmod -R g+w /usr/local/lib/node_modules /usr/local/bin

# Or create a runners group and add all users to it
sudo groupadd runners
for i in {0..10}; do
    sudo usermod -aG runners runner-$i 2>/dev/null || true
done
sudo usermod -aG runners runner-+ 2>/dev/null || true

sudo chgrp -R runners /usr/local/lib/node_modules /usr/local/bin
sudo chmod -R g+w /usr/local/lib/node_modules /usr/local/bin

As said not sure why this suddenly happened, maybe you have an idea?

[vbem]

Hi @stefandevo ,

As we known, if we use npm install -g foo instead of npm install foo, npm puts foo into a global folder (on Unix, typically /usr/local/lib/node_modules) instead of local folder (such as ~/.node_modules). This may influence different runners (under Linux users runner-1, runner-2, etc.) on a same host and this is not recommended.

Please check your npm configurations (CLI options, environment variables, conf files, etc.) and remove -g.

If for some reason, -g is a must, you can use sudo npm ... in your GitHub workflow file.

[stefandevo]

Ok @vbem thanks for this. As this is the Claude Code Github runner we don't control the installation module nor control how npm is used. So in this case I went with this security setting on the VPS. Thanks for your input and your great library.