Install Electron globally on Linux

Just recently I bumped into the problem of installing Electron on my system globally, and it seems very much, like I am not the only one out there, who encounters the same problem.

Usually, what you would do, to install a node package globally, e.g. Electron, you would type something like

sudo npm install -g electron@latest

Unfortunately this command spits out an error, sounding similar to this:

/usr/bin/electron -> /usr/lib/node_modules/electron/cli.js

> electron@4.0.1 postinstall /usr/lib/node_modules/electron
> node install.js

/usr/lib/node_modules/electron/install.js:49
  throw err
  ^

Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/lib/node_modules/electron/.electron'
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! electron@4.0.1 postinstall: `node install.js`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the electron@4.0.1 postinstall script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /root/.npm/_logs/2019-01-20T08_50_17_638Z-debug.log

The error basically says, that the install script ‘install.js’ does not have sufficient permissions to make changes in the ‘/usr/lib/node_modules/’ folder.
To solve the missing permission issue from above, I found to use some additional parameters in the install command. This should allow you to install the npm electron package globally on your system:

sudo npm install -g electron@latest --unsafe-perm=true --allow-root

Even tho this allows you to bypass the issue, it is not the recommended way to install npm packages!