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Zoltan Kochan daf834397a fix: prune stale download and tarball spill directories (#16620)
Clean up spill directories left after an interrupted download or archive extraction during store prune. Reuse the existing store-directory scan and removal helpers without adding install-time work.

Only remove matching directories when their own mtime and the mtimes of their immediate files are more than 24 hours old. Checking files preserves an old directory whose download is still writing. Stream file entries and check one directory and file at a time to bound pending filesystem work. Stop scanning a directory after its first recent file. Skip symlinks and tolerate ENOENT when another process finishes cleanup first.

Age is a conservative heuristic, not a process-liveness check: an install suspended for over 24 hours without filesystem activity can lose its spill directory.

Add regression coverage for stale, recent, empty, and unrelated entries, symlinks, missing stores, recent writes in old directories, and expected versus unexpected filesystem errors. Close SQLite fixture handles before removing test directories for Windows compatibility.

Closes pnpm/tasks#109.
2026-10-06 01:23:25 +02:00

2.3 KiB

id, title
id title
store pnpm store

Managing the package store.

Commands

status

Checks for modified packages in the store.

Returns exit code 0 if the content of the package is the same as it was at the time of unpacking.

add

Functionally equivalent to pnpm add, except this adds new packages to the store directly without modifying any projects or files outside of the store.

prune

Removes unreferenced packages from the store.

Unreferenced packages are packages that are not used by any projects on the system. Packages can become unreferenced after most installation operations, for instance when dependencies are made redundant.

For example, during pnpm install, package foo@1.0.0 is updated to foo@1.0.1. pnpm will keep foo@1.0.0 in the store, as it does not automatically remove packages. If package foo@1.0.0 is not used by any other project on the system, it becomes unreferenced. Running pnpm store prune would remove foo@1.0.0 from the store.

Running pnpm store prune is not harmful and has no side effects on your projects. If future installations require removed packages, pnpm will download them again.

It is best practice to run pnpm store prune occasionally to clean up the store, but not too frequently. Sometimes, unreferenced packages become required again. This could occur when switching branches and installing older dependencies, in which case pnpm would need to re-download all removed packages, briefly slowing down the installation process.

pnpm store prune also removes temporary download and extraction directories left by interrupted installs when the directories and their files have not been modified for more than 24 hours. More recent directories are kept.

After pruning, pnpm displays the total size of removed files.

When the global virtual store is enabled, pnpm store prune also performs mark-and-sweep garbage collection on the global virtual store's links/ directory. Projects using the store are registered via symlinks in {storeDir}/v11/projects/, allowing pnpm to track active usage and safely remove unused packages from the global virtual store.

path

Returns the path to the active store directory.