That was definitely one of the gotchas cgrinton. The other was the confusing error about being unable to create some install directories. (I saw another member struggled with this issue.) I solved that by creating a different location to install the nodejs apps with npm, and setting the environment variable to redirect before running the install for gulp and lithium-sdk.
# set a location to install these node apps
RUN mkdir /home/sdkuser/.npm-global
ENV NPM_CONFIG_PREFIX=/home/sdkuser/.npm-global
It would be nice if Khoros support or services decided to create an "official" Docker image for SDK users that they could keep current as the SDK gets versioned (which is infrequent, I know). Happy to donate my Dockerfile to the cause as a start.