mongoose-private-paths (as distributed) was installing a second dependency of mongoose during its npm install. This caused packages/frolf to ignore the global mongoose data connection and prefer the local installation, which hid its connection to the database. Fixed bug simply by removing the packages/frolf/node_modules/mongoose I had locally. Must be careful, however, since packages/frolf/node_modules is not tracked. Need to prevent 'npm install' from installing mongoose again.