I think NPM is an issue here, when deploying to production, would root access be needed unless things are correctly setup for npm to not require root access? https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/fixing-npm-permissions This article talks about how to make npm less needy for permissions, and in my case, I want to deploy to cloud with a PaaS container, and I don't have root access. So it seems we need a solution for how to make nmp work without root, and that means administration of npm is needed, as talked about in this article, 2 choices, and I don't know which is best. thx, Jeff.