If you install packages from npm locally, i.e. without using -g option, the packages are downloaded to ./node_modules folder in your current directory. Some of these packages, like JSDoc and JSHint, come with an executable file that you can execute from the command line. When installing these packages globally, npm puts their executables on PATH so that you can call the package executables from anywhere on your computer. When doing a local install, you may often need to call these executables from the current directory.
On OSX, npm automatically exposes these locally installed binaries on path. So, if you are at the root of your NodeJS project, you can call the binaries or executables of the packages you have installed locally. But, for multiple Linux distributions, like Debian, Ubuntu or Arch Linux, the local binaries are not available from the root of the NodeJS project.
The way out is to add ./node_modules/.bin folder to PATH. npm puts all executables in that folder when doing a local install.
To do that, run this command on the command line:
$ PATH=“node_modules/.bin”:$PATH
To make the change permanent, edit ~/.bashrc and add this to it:
export PATH="node_modules/.bin":$PATH
You will need to do source ~/.bashrc to load it for the current session.
This trick is particularly useful if you have multiple versions of the same NodeJS package installed per project. That way, even if you have a different global version, the local version of the package will take precedence.