Ghost Upgrade NPM Cannot Run in WD Error

I am trying to upgrade to Ghost 0.7.9 and followed the directions of upgrading to a node version 4.2.x < 5.x.x (My version is 4.7.3) and had no issues following all of the steps until I reached having to run npm install --production for some reason I’m getting npm WARN cannot run in wd ghost@0.7.9 npm install semver && node -e "require('./core/server/utils/startup-check.js').nodeVersion()" (wd=/var/www/ghost) and can’t seem to figure out a solution. I’m running my droplet via SSH with a root user. Could it be my root user permissions for NPM?

Full run:

npm WARN cannot run in wd ghost@0.7.9 npm install semver && node -e "require('./core/server/utils/startup-check.js').nodeVersion()" (wd=/var/www/ghost)
 
> jsonpath@0.2.2 postinstall /var/www/ghost/node_modules/jsonpath
> node lib/aesprim.js > generated/aesprim-browser.js


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I also tried running npm cache clean and rm -rf node_moudles, but still received the same result. Any help or guidance?

Not sure if this detail helps, but I followed the chown -R ghost:ghost core command presented in step 6 of the ghost upgrade documentation and curious if that impacted the root user that I’m logged in as. Would it?