pnpm

Fast, disk space efficient npm installs

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
• Benchmark
• Recipes
  • Usage in monorepos
  • Continuous Integration

Background

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

=> - a link (also known as a hard link)
-> - a symlink (or junction on Windows)

~/.pnpm-store
   ├─ chalk/1.1.1/
   |  ├─ index.js
   |  └─ package.json
   ├─ ansi-styles/2.1.0/
   |  ├─ index.js
   |  └─ package.json
   └─ has-ansi/2.0.0/
      ├─ index.js
      └─ package.json
.
└─ node_modules/
   ├─ .resolutions/
   |   ├─ chalk/1.1.1/
   |   |  ├─ node_modules/
   |   |  |  ├─ chalk        -> ../package
   |   |  |  ├─ ansi-styles/ -> ../../ansi-styles/2.1.0/package
   |   |  |  └─ has-ansi/    -> ../../has-ansi/2.0.0/package
   |   |  └─ package
   |   |     ├─ index.js     => ~/.pnpm-store/chalk/1.1.1/index.js
   |   |     └─ package.json => ~/.pnpm-store/chalk/1.1.1/package.json
   |   ├─ has-ansi/2.0.0/
   |   |  ├─ node_modules/
   |   |  |  └─ has-ansi     -> ../package
   |   |  └─ package
   |   |     ├─ index.js     => ~/.pnpm-store/has-ansi/2.0.0/index.js
   |   |     └─ package.js   => ~/.pnpm-store/has-ansi/2.0.0/package.json
   |   └─ ansi-styles/2.1.0/
   |      ├─ node_modules/
   |      |  └─ ansi-styles  -> ../package
   |      └─ package
   |         ├─ index.js     => ~/.pnpm-store/ansi-styles/2.1.0/index.js
   |         └─ package.js   => ~/.pnpm-store/ansi-styles/2.1.0/package.json
   └─ chalk/                 -> ./.resolutions/chalk/1.1.1/package

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 the programmatic API, see: API.

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