Installing node-sass fails on Ubuntu 18.04

I have a simple next.js project, which I created following their tutorial. It builds and runs well on my Windows development machine.

I want to deploy it on Ubuntu 18.04.02 LTS but when I clone the git project and run npm install it fails to install node-sass with the following error message:

> node-sass@4.12.0 install /var/www/example.com/beta/node_modules/node-sass
> node scripts/install.js

internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:584
    throw err;
    ^

Error: Cannot find module '/var/www/example.com/beta/node_modules/node-sass/scripts/install.js'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:582:15)
    at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:508:25)
    at Function.Module.runMain (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:754:12)
    at startup (internal/bootstrap/node.js:283:19)
    at bootstrapNodeJSCore (internal/bootstrap/node.js:622:3)
npm WARN optional SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: fsevents@1.2.9 (node_modules/fsevents):
npm WARN notsup SKIPPING OPTIONAL DEPENDENCY: Unsupported platform for fsevents@1.2.9: wanted {"os":"darwin","arch":"any"} (current: {"os":"linux","arch":"x64"})

npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! node-sass@4.12.0 install: `node scripts/install.js`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the node-sass@4.12.0 install 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: ...

Here is a gist of the log file. See the last few lines for the error (I have included the whole file in case there is other information that is useful).

My NodeJS version is 10.15.3 and my NPM version is 6.4.1. I am not sure how to run next.js project on Ubuntu.

Solution

Apparently, I needed to install it with --unsafe-perms flag:

npm install --unsafe-perms

No explanation onto why it needs this and the unsafe word is not recommended by many.

In addition, the folder permissions needed to be in such a way that the script can create folders. I had to create a folder as me, clone the repo there, run the npm install --unsafe-perms, and then set the permissions as of a production web server.

For reference see here.