npm install from git repo fails with ENOENT - node.js

Question

I am trying to install one of my own packages as follows
npm install --save gfarrell/state.js
and I'm getting the following errors (full log here):
npm ERR! addLocal Could not install gfarrell/state.js
npm ERR! Error: ENOENT, stat 'gfarrell/state.js'
npm ERR! If you need help, you may report this *entire* log,
npm ERR! including the npm and node versions, at:
npm ERR! <http://github.com/npm/npm/issues>
npm ERR! System Darwin 13.4.0
npm ERR! command "node" "/usr/local/bin/npm" "install" "--save" "gfarrell/state.js"
npm ERR! cwd /Users/gideon/Code/PresenceMonitor
npm ERR! node -v v0.10.28
npm ERR! npm -v 1.4.10
npm ERR! path gfarrell/state.js
npm ERR! code ENOENT
npm ERR! errno 34
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Additional logging details can be found in:
npm ERR! /Users/gideon/Code/PresenceMonitor/npm-debug.log
npm ERR! not ok code 0
Now I've tried various solutions including:
npm cache clean
sudo npm cache clean
rm -rf ~/.npm
sudo npm install --save gfarrell/state.js
npm install --save git://github.com/gfarrell/state.js.git
but nothing has changed the error output. I can't see anything wrong with the module's package.json, and I haven't added anything to my local package.json either. I actually tried installing this package on an earlier version and it worked fine, so I just don't understand what is going wrong.
Needless to say, it's all rather frustrating. Is there something else going on that I'm just not seeing?

Answer 1

This is most probably an authentication issue. You should add --verbose to the install command to se more output. You should see this line in your console output when running with verbose on:
npm ERR! git clone git#github.com:gfarrell/state.js Permission denied (publickey).
Check if you are authenticated to Github using the following command:
ssh -T git#github.com
When you are authenticated correctly you should see the following output:
Hi gfarrell! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.
Github has a great guide on SSH keys as well as how to solve common errors.
Fix your Github authentication and the npm install will start working.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue myself. Because the last "ok" line of the verbose output started with "addRemoteGit", I traced the issue to a function named addRemoteGit in the npm source file cache.js (in v1.4.9, it has now been moved into add-remote-git.js). By adding a call to log.verbose(p), I found out npm could not write to ~/.npm/_git-remotes/.
Basically it was a permission problem: my ~/.npm directory contained files & directories owned by root. I solved the issue by simply running:
sudo find ~/.npm -exec chown $USER:$USER {} \;