[BUG] npm uninstall doesn't work in 7.7.0

[G-Rath]

Current Behavior:

npm uninstall <package> doesn't do anything when using v7.7.0

Expected Behavior:

That the package I specify is uninstalled :)

Steps To Reproduce:

1. npm i -g npm@7.7.0
2. npm init -y
3. npm install luxon
4. npm uninstall luxon

Users/G-Rath/te is 📦 v1.0.0 took 2s
❯ npm un luxon

up to date, audited 1 package in 234ms

found 0 vulnerabilities

If you replace step 1. with npm i -g npm@7.6.0, it all works as expected:

Users/G-Rath/te is 📦 v1.0.0 took 6s
❯ npm un luxon

removed 1 package, and audited 1 package in 2s

found 0 vulnerabilities

Environment:

OS: Ubuntu 18.04 via WSLv1
Node: 14.6.0
npm: 7.7.0

[erunion]

Also seeing this on npm remove.

$ npm remove react
npm ERR! code EACCES
npm ERR! syscall open
npm ERR! path /usr/local/package-lock.json
npm ERR! errno -13
npm ERR! Error: EACCES: permission denied, open '/usr/local/package-lock.json'
npm ERR!  [Error: EACCES: permission denied, open '/usr/local/package-lock.json'] {
npm ERR!   errno: -13,
npm ERR!   code: 'EACCES',
npm ERR!   syscall: 'open',
npm ERR!   path: '/usr/local/package-lock.json'
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!     /Users/jon/.npm/_logs/2021-03-23T21_03_16_479Z-debug.log

I do not see this on 7.6.3.

[G-Rath]

@erunion that looks like a different issue to me, specifically thats an EACCES error; mine is just outputting "up to date" so its not even trying to do anything.

(I'll update my issue to reflect that)

[erunion]

👍 I'll open up a new ticket.

[jameschensmith]

I am also facing this error. I was looking into this to see if my changes to arborist in v7.7.0 affected this. Fortunately, it didn't 😅 It appears to be due to this commit this commit, which is removing references to flatOptions in favor of a more unified config.

By reverting this commit, removal works again. But, we should figure out the reason why this isn't working 😋 So, it has to do with the return value of this.npm.config.get('prefix'). On my machine, it's returning the default value of prefix in npm config, which appears to be the Node.js installation directory (this is also npm prefix -g). From the previous flatOptions, this returned undefined, which it then passed to arborist. I believe both of these are incorrect, because when I run npm prefix in an npm project directory, I tend to get my current directory 😊

Next step would be checking to see why this.npm.config.get('prefix') is not returning the current directory.

[jameschensmith]

As a temporary workaround, you could possibly do this (below is POSIX-compliant shell):

PREFIX=$(pwd) npm rm [<@scope>/]<pkg>...

I was able to uninstall a package using the above, but YMMV.

[ruyadorno]

fixed in npm@7.7.1 thanks @jameschensmith for the quick patch! 🎉