pnpm

High performance npm

pnpm is a fast implementation of npm install.

Install

Install it via npm.

npm install -g pnpm.js

Use pnpm in place of npm. It overrides pnpm i and pnpm install—all other commands will passthru to npm.

pnpm install lodash

Preview release

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

pnpm install
- npm packages
- GitHub packages
- @scoped packages
- tarball packages
- compiled packages
- file packages
- bin executables
- --global installs
- --save et al
pnpm uninstall
pnpm ls

Design

pnpm maintains a flat storage of all your dependencies in node_modules/.store. They are then symlinked whereever they're needed. This is like npm@2's recursive module handling (without the disk space bloat), and like npm3s flat dependency tree (except with each module being predictably atomic). To illustrate, an installation of chalk@1.1.1 may look like this:

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

Benchmark

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

Acknowledgements

ied is built on a very similar premise.

Thanks

ricostacruz.com · GitHub @rstacruz · Twitter @rstacruz