I haven't used scss in a while, and of course, when you don't touch something in a while, it won't work anymore. That was the case with node-sass, used to compile .scss file. Here's my notes on how to reinstall node-sass globally on MacOS, including the necessary Atom package, in case it could be useful to someone else.

An important thing to know is npm installs packages locally within your projects by default. In this case, we want to install the package globally. However the downside of this is that you need to be root (or use sudo) to be able to install globally. The following method makes it possible to install packages globally for a given user without the need to be root.

1. Install node.js

Simply download the installer from node.js website and isntall it.

2. Create a directory to store global packages

mkdir "${HOME}/.npm-packages"

3. Tell npm where to store globally installed packages

npm config set prefix "${HOME}/.npm-packages"

4. Ensure npm will find installed binaries

Add the following to your .bash_profile:

nano ~/.bash_profile

NPM_PACKAGES="${HOME}/.npm-packages"

export PATH="$PATH:$NPM_PACKAGES/bin"

Reload the bash profile :

source ~/.bash_profile

5. Install node-sass

npm install -g node-sass

You can me sure the package is correctly installed :

$ node-sass -v

node-sass   4.12.0  (Wrapper)   [JavaScript]
libsass     3.5.4   (Sass Compiler) [C/C++]

6. Install Atom package

I use sass-autocompile in Atom. This package will use node-sass to compile your .scss files on save.

References :

• Install npm packages globally without sudo on macOS and Linux