Getting Node running on Windows with Homestead

gistfile1.txt

I did a fair amount of poking around with this issue and found the following combination of suggestions to work for me.
I am running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, Homestead 2.0 and install all my projects in a "code/project name" directory

Seems the main reason for NPM not working on Windows machines is it runs up against the file name character limit in Windows even though
you are installing on your vagrant/homestead box.

First I added this to my homestead.rb file:

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb| vb.customize ["setextradata", :id, "VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/v-root", "1"]

as follows:

    # Configure A Few VirtualBox Settings
    config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
      vb.name = settings["name"] ||= "homestead"
      vb.customize ["setextradata", :id, "VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/v-root", "1"]
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--memory", settings["memory"] ||= "2048"]
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--cpus", settings["cpus"] ||= "1"]
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnsproxy1", "on"]
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "on"]
      vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--ostype", "Ubuntu_64"]
    end
    

Then I added the following to my .bash_aliases file in /home/vagrant (you may need to adjust paths to get it to work on your setup)

donpm()
{
SITE=${1:-"default"}

if [ ! -d "/usr/local/npm/$SITE" ]; then
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/npm/$SITE
fi

if [ ! -f "/usr/local/npm/$SITE/package.json" ]; then
sudo cp -f ~/code/$SITE/package.json /usr/local/npm/$SITE/
fi

cd /usr/local/npm/$SITE
sudo npm install

if [ ! -L "~/code/$SITE/node_modules" ]; then
sudo ln -s /usr/local/npm/$SITE/node_modules ~/code/$SITE/node_modules
fi

cd ~/code/$SITE
}

and added this at the end of the file 

alias winpm=donpm

NOTE: the last bit of the script (the sym-linking part) does not work on my computer...but that's probably my computer. So I run that manually afterwards

With the above in place I do the following to get node installed for a project:

I SSH into vagrant and from the root (may be from "code" directory) run winpm <name of project directory> 
(this process take a while to complete) 

When finished

close vagrant shell
halt the vagrant box
close GIT Bash (the CLI tool I am using)
Restart GIT Bash as administrator
vagrant up
SSH into vagrant
run the sym linking command:
sudo ln -s /usr/local/npm/<name of project directory>/node_modules ~/code/<name of project directory>/node_modules

After you're finished you should be able to back out of everything, restart vagrant as you normally would and have Node/npm accessible
from your project.

The only other issue I've noticed, and again is probably due to my machine, is Gulp Notify does not work...but running gulp from 
your project via SSH will do everything else it's supposed to.