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

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.

Configuring

pnpm uses npm's programmatic API to read configs. Hence, you should set configs for pnpm the same way you would for npm.

Furthermore, pnpm uses the same configs that npm uses for doing installations. If you have a private registry and npm is configured to work with it, pnpm should be able to authorize requests as well, with no additional configuration.

However, pnpm has some unique configs as well:

store-path

Default: ~/.pnpm-store
Type: path

The location where all the packages are saved on the disk.

local-registry

Default: ~/.pnpm-registry
Type: path

The location of all the downloaded packages and package meta information. Can be also used as a verdaccio storage.

offline

Default: false
Type: Boolean

If true, pnpm will use only the local registry mirror to get packages. If a package won't be found locally, installation will fail.

network-concurrency

Default: 16
Type: Number

Controls the maximum number of HTTP requests that can be done simultaneously.

child-concurrency

Default: 5
Type: Number

Controls the number of child processes run parallely to build node modules.

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

License

MIT

README.md

pnpm

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