Agreed, I try to avoid installing anything globally whenever possible ;)

Sometimes I still like running binaries from locally installed modules directly rather than via npm scripts (like when testing or fooling with different configurations). You can do that by adding this to your path:

export PATH=$PATH:./node_modules/.bin

This way whenever you’re in the root of a node project you can just run webpack (or whatever else you happen to be working with) straight from the command line without having to worry about global namespace collisions, version conflicts, etc.