Where should my npm modules be installed on Mac OS X?

npm root -g

to check the npm_modules global location

Second Thomas David Kehoe, with the following caveat --

If you are using node version manager (nvm), your global node modules will be stored under whatever version of node you are using at the time you saved the module.

So ~/.nvm/versions/node/{version}/lib/node_modules/.

/usr/local/lib/node_modules is the correct directory for globally installed node modules.

/usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules makes no sense to me. One issue here is that you're confused because there are two directories called node_modules:

/usr/local/lib/node_modules
/usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules

The latter seems to be node modules that came with Node, e.g., lodash, when the former is Node modules that I installed using npm.