pnpm

What is pnpm?

pnpm is a fast, disk space efficient package manager for JavaScript that works with the npm and Yarn registries. It uses hard links and symlinks to save disk space and improve installation speed. It also has a strict node_modules structure that helps to avoid issues with phantom dependencies.

What are pnpm's main functionalities?

Installing packages

Installs the lodash package into your project. This is similar to npm install or yarn add.

pnpm install lodash

Creating a new project

Initializes a new package.json file for your project, similar to npm init or yarn init.

pnpm init

Adding a package to dependencies

Adds the react package to your project's dependencies, similar to npm install react --save or yarn add react.

pnpm add react

Adding a package to devDependencies

Adds the typescript package to your project's devDependencies, similar to npm install typescript --save-dev or yarn add typescript --dev.

pnpm add --save-dev typescript

Updating packages

Updates all the packages in your project to their latest versions based on the specified ranges in package.json, similar to npm update or yarn upgrade.

pnpm update

Running scripts

Runs the script named 'build' specified in your package.json, similar to npm run build or yarn run build.

pnpm run build

Other packages similar to pnpm

npm

npm is the default package manager for Node.js and is the most widely used. It has a large ecosystem and is well-supported, but it can be slower and use more disk space compared to pnpm.

yarn

Yarn is a package manager that was created by Facebook to address some of npm's shortcomings. It introduced lockfiles and deterministic installations. Yarn is faster than npm but can still use more disk space compared to pnpm.

README

pnpm

Performant npm installations

pnpm is a fast implementation of npm install. It is loosely based off ied.

Read our contributing guide if you're looking to contribute.

Follow the pnpm Twitter account for updates.

Table of Contents

• Background
• Install
• Usage
  • Known issues
• Benchmark
• Recipes
  • Usage in monorepos
  • Continuous Integration

Background

pnpm maintains a flat storage of all your dependencies in node_modules/.store. They are then symlinked wherever they're needed. This nets you the benefits of less disk space usage, while keeping your node_modules clean. See store layout for an explanation.

.
└─ node_modules/
   ├─ .store/
   │  ├─ chalk@1.1.1/_/
   │  │  └─ node_modules/
   │  │     ├─ ansi-styles      -> ../../../ansi-styles@2.1.0/_
   │  │     └─ has-ansi         -> ../../../has-ansi@2.0.0/_
   │  ├─ ansi-styles@2.1.0/_/
   │  └─ has-ansi@2.0.0/_/
   └─ chalk                     -> .store/chalk@1.1.1/_

Install

Install it via npm.

npm install -g pnpm

Do you wanna use pnpm on CI servers? See: Continuous Integration.

Usage

Use pnpm in place of npm. It overrides pnpm i, pnpm install and some other command, the rest will passthru to npm.

pnpm install lodash

For using globally installed packages, see: global install.

For using the programmatic API, see: API.

Known issues

Some packages are trying to find and use other packages in node_modules. However, when installed via pnpm, all the dependencies in node_modules are just symlinks. Node's require ignores symlinks when resolving modules and this causes a lot of issues. Luckily, starting from v6.3.0, Node.js has a CLI option to preserve symlinks when resolving modules (--preserve-symlinks).

Things to remember:

• pnpm is best used on Node.js >= 6.3.0
• it is recommended to run Node with the --preserve-symlinks option. E.g. node --preserve-symlinks index. Note: it is important that --preserve-symlinks is at the beginning of the command, otherwise it is ignored.
• CLI apps installed with pnpm are configured to correctly work with symlinked dependency trees. If a global package is used to work with a pnpm package, the global package should be installed via pnpm.

Benchmark

pnpm is usually 10 times faster than npm and 30% faster than yarn. See this benchmark which compares the three package managers on different types of applications.

time npm i babel-preset-es2015 browserify chalk debug minimist mkdirp
    66.15 real        15.60 user         3.54 sys

time pnpm i babel-preset-es2015 browserify chalk debug minimist mkdirp
    11.04 real         6.85 user         2.85 sys

Prior art

• Compared to ied
• Compared to npm

Preview release

pnpm will stay in <1.0.0 until it's achieved feature parity with npm install. See roadmap for details.

License

MIT © Rico Sta. Cruz and contributors