Once upon a time I was running Directus with the help of Cloudpanel. Is installing Directus with NPM deprecated now? It’s completely missing from the new docs. I’d rather not install/rely on Docker especially on my local machine. This now seems to be limited to old Node 18: npm init directus-project directus
Hi there, welcome to the community! Glad to have you here. 
Personally, I’m right there with you - or used to be at least 
. Didn’t want to use Docker or didn’t think I really needed it. Now - 100% would not go back. Directus + Docker keeps me on the happy path - instead of messing with dependencies in all the different versions of Node on my machine.
At the company level, we strongly discourage running Directus through “raw” Node.js.
There are system dependencies like isolated-vm and libvips that can cause issues.
Using Docker solves those issues and makes for a much more reliable development and deployment experience.
Recommended approaches:
- Docker - Our preferred method for production deployments
- Directus Cloud - Fully managed hosting if you want zero infrastructure headaches
The npm installation method isn’t technically deprecated, but it’s definitely not the path we’d recommend for most use cases.
Let me know if you have any other questions about getting set up!