'ENOSPC: no space left on device' when installing on different directory on linux

[dgasparri]

I ran the command:

npx dalai alpaca install 13B --home /mnt/nvme/dalai

and I got:

npm WARN tar TAR_ENTRY_ERROR ENOSPC: no space left on device, open '/home/ec2-user/.npm/_npx/3c737cbb02d79cc9/node_modules/dalai/bin/web/public/webfonts/fa-brands-400.woff2'
npm WARN tar TAR_ENTRY_ERROR ENOSPC: no space left on device, open '/home/ec2-user/.npm/_npx/3c737cbb02d79cc9/node_modules/dalai/bin/web/public/webfonts/fa-solid-900.woff2'
npm WARN tar TAR_ENTRY_ERROR ENOSPC: no space left on device, open '/home/ec2-user/.npm/_npx/3c737cbb02d79cc9/node_modules/dalai/bin/web/public/webfonts/fa-v4compatibility.woff2'
npm ERR! code ENOENT
npm ERR! syscall mkdir
npm ERR! path /home/ec2-user/.npm/_npx/3c737cbb02d79cc9/node_modules/.bin
npm ERR! errno -2
npm ERR! enoent ENOENT: no such file or directory, mkdir '/home/ec2-user/.npm/_npx/3c737cbb02d79cc9/node_modules/.bin'
npm ERR! enoent This is related to npm not being able to find a file.
npm ERR! enoent

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in: /home/ec2-user/.npm/_logs/2023-04-01T13_31_24_439Z-debug-0.log

the log file had rows like:

1645 warn tar TAR_ENTRY_ERROR ENOSPC: no space left on device, open '/home/ec2-user/.npm/_npx/3c737cbb02d79cc9/node_modules/dalai/bin/web/public/webfonts/fa-v4compatibility.woff2'

Disk usage was:

3.5G ~/dalai (has only venv subdir)

I believe that even with the option --home /other_dir, npx tries to download files to the home folder

HOW I SOLVED IT: I moved .npm and dalai to /mnt/nvme/ and created a symlink in the home directory, but that's a workaround, not a solution