pnpm - Performant node package manager

What is pnpm?

Performant npm (command name: pnpm) is a fast, disk-efficient package manager for Node.js that serves as an alternative to npm. Unlike npm, which comes bundled with Node.js, pnpm is a separate tool you install yourself.

Key differences with npm:

• Stores packages in a global cache and links them to projects via hard links.
  Each package version is downloaded once and reused across all projects
• Uses a stricter node_modules structure with symlinks, preventing packages from accessing undeclared dependencies

Benefits:

• For development: Dramatically faster installations and significant disk space savings specially good for developers when working on multiple projects
• For production: Since modern applications are containerized, improvements are modest - slightly faster builds and marginally smaller container images due to deduplicated sub-dependencies. It introduces no overhead while providing small benefits, making it a solid choice for production environments

Install

# Using npm
npm install -g pnpm
# Using Homebrew
brew install pnpm
# Using curl (standalone)
curl -fsSL https://get.pnpm.io/install.sh | sh -

Configure

pnpm needs the $PNPM_HOME environment variable to be properly configured. It also needs to be added to your $PATH. The command below will set this up and modify ~/.zshrc so future terminal sessions work correctly.

pnpm setup

Now open a new terminal window and continue there OR apply the changes manually in the current session: source ~/.zshrc

Verify Installation

Check pnpm is installed

pnpm --version
# As of December 2025, should be something like: 10.x.y

Check where pnpm is installed

which pnpm

Verify pnpm store location

pnpm store path
# Should show something like: /Users/yourusername/Library/pnpm/store/v10

Basic Usage

New project

Create package.json. Similar to npm init

pnpm init

Install/Add a package

pnpm add react          # Adds to dependencies in package.json
pnpm add -D typescript  # Adds to devDependencies in package.json
pnpm add -g nodemon     # Global install, not added to any package.json

Existing projects

Install all dependencies from package.json. Equivalent to npm install

pnpm install
# or just
pnpm i

Run scripts

Execute a "dev" script defined in "scripts" section in package.json. Equivalent to npm run dev

pnpm run dev
# or omit 'run'
pnpm dev

Other common commands

pnpm remove <package>   # Uninstall and remove from package.json
pnpm update             # Update dependencies
pnpm list               # List installed packages
pnpm outdated           # Check for outdated packages

That is all.
See you later 🐊！