What is pnpm?
It uses hard links and symlinks to save one version of a module only ever once on a disk. When using npm or Yarn for example, if you have 100 projects using the same version of lodash, you will have 100 copies of lodash on disk. With pnpm, lodash will be saved in a single place on the disk and a hard link will put it into the node_modules where it should be installed.
pnpm is a tool in the Package Managers category of a tech stack.
pnpm is an open source tool with 31.3K GitHub stars and 1.1K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to pnpm's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses pnpm?
Companies
74 companies reportedly use pnpm in their tech stacks, including BlaBlaCar, Yousign, and Lendit.
Developers
188 developers on StackShare have stated that they use pnpm.
Pros of pnpm
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pnpm's Features
- Fast. As fast as npm and Yarn
- Efficient. One version of a package is saved only ever once on a disk
- Great for multi-package repositories (a.k.a. monorepos)
- See the recursive commands
- Strict. A package can access only dependencies that are specified in its package.json
- Deterministic. Has a lockfile called pnpm-lock.yaml
- Works everywhere. Works on Windows, Linux and OS X
- Aliases. Install different versions of the same package or import it using a different name.
pnpm Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to pnpm?
npm
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
Yarn
Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.
Lerna
It is a popular and widely used package written in JavaScript. It optimizes the workflow around managing multi-package repositories with git and npm.
Git
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
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