title: npm won't install packages locally. What's wrong?
body: <p>I want to install packages locally, but npm is always installing packages to the global location. I'm running the following command:</p>
  
  <pre><code>npm install serialport
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I do not have a .npmrc command and I'm not using the -g flag, so I don't know why it's not installing locally. Here's a snippet from the config dump showing that global is false:
      $ npm config ls -l | grep global
      global = false
      globalconfig = "/usr/local/etc/npmrc"
      globalignorefile = "/usr/local/etc/npmignore"</p>
  
  <p>And the packages are still being installed like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>serialport@0.7.3 ../../../../node_modules/serialport
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So unless I am totally wrong about what "local" means, this seems wrong. I was under the impression that "local" meant in the current working directory so that I could do a "require" in my main code file. See: <a href="http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/03/23/npm-1-0-global-vs-local-installation/">http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/03/23/npm-1-0-global-vs-local-installation/</a> as referenced in a previous npm related question.</p>
  
  <p>Can someone please give me some hints on this? Thank you very much.</p>
  
  <p>P.S. It's not specific to the serialport module. It's happening with all of them.</p>