Ask HN: How do you 'think' through path problems?

Running a laravel homestead VM using vagrant. Had to install Node. Node expects to use

"/usr/lib/"

when in reality its C:\Users\Me\Homestead\code\learn

here is the exact error:

npm WARN checkPermissions Missing write access to /usr/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/safe-buffer

Google hasnt fixed my issue, but I'm sure with enough time it will.

My question is- Is there a way to think about this and solve it without/minimal google?

Ive ran into many path problems in my 10 years of programming and it seems to be trial and error google chase.

Current thinking is that there is some file in Vagrant VM, like homestead.yaml, Vagrantfile, maybe a .json file. I would need to add something to specify that node.js has the correct folder mapping.

How do you solve these problems?