I've been doing some messing around and thought I'd share what I've discovered here, in case it can help.

I've been doing all kinds of uninstalling and re-installing of various programs, and am now running node from the base installation from nodejs.org rather then through brew package manager. Although I don't think that has anything to do with the error i was running into as I still run into this error under a certain condition.

So when I first installed nodebb, I've realized that was the master github branch, and npm install runs just fine on it. So after that I decided to branch v0.9.x again and see if npm install worked, and it did not work. Same kind of timed out errors as above. So after that i went ahead and branched v0.9.2 and npm install works on v0.9.2.

So, this error seems to be directly related to the latest v0.9.x branch. I tried upgrading my 0.9.2 nodebb version up to the v0.9.x branch, and i can't, it gets stuck on this step:
1. Bringing base dependencies up to date...

I also created a test directory for v0.9.x and tried replacing its package.json with the package.json of the master build just to see if it could bypass the time out errors. I know doing that isn't recommended as it could possibly break the software overall, just wanted to see if it could pass the timed out errors, but it still didn't.

Hello,

I'm running into a problem where NPM seems to time out when installing dependencies for NodeBB. It happens when installing NodeBB both from NPM or after running npm install from a git clone. It's not my network as I'm able to install other node packages through NPM just fine. It's strange because earlier this week I was able to install NodeBB fine. I removed it because i wanted to do a fresh install to test something.

Here is a snippet from the npm install log when things start going weird:

'
23739 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry emoji/yen.png
23740 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry emoji/yum.png
23741 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry emoji/zap.png
23742 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry emoji/zero.png
23743 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry emoji/zzz.png
23744 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry client-scripts/emoji-textcomplete.js
23745 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry plugin.json
23746 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry styles/style.less
23747 silly gunzTarPerm extractEntry templates/admin/plugins/emoji-extended.tpl
23748 silly cache afterAdd [email protected]
23749 verbose afterAdd /Users/will/.npm/nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended/0.4.17/package/package.json not in flight; writing
23750 verbose afterAdd /Users/will/.npm/nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended/0.4.17/package/package.json written
23751 info retry will retry, error on last attempt: Error: read ETIMEDOUT
23752 info attempt registry request try #2 at 9:00:13 PM
23753 http fetch GET http://registry.npmjs.org/async/-/async-0.2.10.tgz
23754 info retry will retry, error on last attempt: Error: read ETIMEDOUT
23755 verbose stack Error: read ECONNRESET
23755 verbose stack at exports._errnoException (util.js:860:11)
23755 verbose stack at TLSWrap.onread (net.js:544:26)
23756 verbose cwd /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/NodeBB
23757 error Darwin 15.2.0
23758 error argv "/usr/local/Cellar/node/5.0.0/bin/node" "/usr/local/bin/npm" "install"
23759 error node v5.0.0
23760 error npm v3.3.9
23761 error code ECONNRESET
23762 error errno ECONNRESET
23763 error syscall read
23764 error network read ECONNRESET
23764 error network This is most likely not a problem with npm itself
23764 error network and is related to network connectivity.
23764 error network In most cases you are behind a proxy or have bad network settings.
23764 error network
23764 error network If you are behind a proxy, please make sure that the
23764 error network 'proxy' config is set properly. See: 'npm help config'
23765 verbose exit [ 1, true ]
'

I've tried removing node completely and reinstalling it. I'm out of ideas to try. Posting here to see if this happens to anyone else.

Edit: running on Mac OS X 10.11.2