In my ember cli app I have moment in both directories, but my ember server only works with the bower path, in my borcfile:
app.import("bower_components/moment/min/moment.min.js");
app.import("node_modules/moment/min/moment.min.js");
the latter says that it can't find it.
In order to reference node modules you ll need to import them by their name, the simplest example is: import Ember from 'ember'
.
For more info regarding modules and the resolver refer to this part of the documentation