As reported in IRC, I've been having issues with the install lifecycle step getting run for leveldown. The module folder is populated, but it doesn't even attempt to build the native addon. The issue was discovered on appneta/node-traceview. I've created a standalone package.json to reproduce the issue.

If I start removing deps from that the issue becomes intermittent and eventually disappears entirely if I remove enough. It seems very likely that it's caused by some sort of race condition, I'm not yet sure where.

npm version: 2.1.17, 2.1.18
node version: 0.10.35
os: Ubuntu 14.10