pnpm

Performant npm

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

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-hosted packages (npm i rstacruz/scourjs)
  • @scoped packages (npm i @rstacruz/tap-spec)
  • tarball release packages (npm i http://foo.com/tar.tgz)
  • compiled packages (npm i node-sass)
  • bundled dependencies: handle bins (npm i fsevents@1.0.6)
  • file packages (npm i file:../path)
  • 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 npm@3s 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

Prior art

ied is built on a very similar premise. pnpm takes huge inspiration from ied.

Unlike ied, however, pnpm will eventually be made to support a globally-shared store so you can keep all your npm modules in one place. With this goal in mind, pnpm also doesn't care much about npm@3's flat dependency tree style.

Limitations

• Windows is not supported.
• You can't shrinkwrap.
• node_modules managed by pnpm can't be queried properly by npm ls.
• You can't use npm prune or npm dedupe.
• Things not ticked off in the to do list are obviously not feature-complete.

Got an idea for workarounds for these issues? Share them.

Thanks

pnpm © 2016+, Rico Sta. Cruz. Released under the MIT License.
Authored and maintained by Rico Sta. Cruz with help from contributors (list).

ricostacruz.com  ·  GitHub @rstacruz  ·  Twitter @rstacruz