Run bower from root user, it's possible? How?

I have a local development server where I test a lot of things, now I'm playing with bower to manage the libraries' dependencies in my Symfony2 project. After getting NodeJS (v0.10.31) installed and bower (1.3.9), I tried to run the command sp:bower:install which belongs to Symfony2 SpBowerBundle from console as root:

Symfony > sp:bower:install
Installing bower dependencies for "TemplateBundle" into "/var/www/html/tanane/src/Tanane/TemplateBundle/Resources/config/bower/../../public/components"

bower ESUDO         Cannot be run with sudo

Additional error details:
Since bower is a user command, there is no need to execute it with superuser permissions.
If you're having permission errors when using bower without sudo, please spend a few minutes learning more about how your system should work and make any necessary repairs.

http://www.joyent.com/blog/installing-node-and-npm
https://gist.github.com/isaacs/579814

You can however run a command with sudo using --allow-root option

I know that adding --allow-root works since I tested directly from bash but it apparently isn't allowed from the bundle command line. Now, is the only way to run bower as root to add --allow-root or does it exist another way ?

Solution 1:

below answer is for symfony framework's bundle, but if you come here from google using phrase "bower root" you have two options to solve that:

add --allow-root to command
set global bower config that will allow running bower as root

Option 1: you can run bower as root by typing:

bower install --allow-root

root is allowed by setting --allow-root command parameter

Option 2: is using global setting that allows root, by creating file: /root/.bowerrc which have inside following configuration:

{ "allow_root": true }

how to do this in SpBowerBundle symfony bundle:
probably you haven't set sp_bower.allow_root to true in SpBowerBundle config

in bundle config, by default you have set something like this:

allow_root: false # optional

but you should have:

allow_root: true

so in app/config/config.yml add this bundle config

sp_bower:
    allow_root: false # optional

bundle config reference (all settings): https://github.com/Spea/SpBowerBundle/blob/master/Resources/doc/configuration_reference.md

Solution 2:

I fixed a similar problem by changing the directory permissions:

sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP ~/.npm
sudo chown -R $USER:$GROUP ~/.config

Solution 3:

If you are encountering this issue on Docker containers just add this line in your Dockerfile:

RUN echo '{ "allow_root": true }' > /root/.bowerrc

Solution 4:

This might be stupid but for me bower install --allow-root did not work but bower --allow-root install did, using grunt-bower-install version 1.6.0

This was on a docker running with root user, perhaps will save someone some time :)

Solution 5:

Faced similar issue when installing swagger-editor. Changed the following line in package.json from

"bower-install": "bower install"

"bower-install": "bower install --allow-root"