31. JS: package manager

Date: 2024-02-21

Status

Accepted

Context

Our development team has been experiencing performance issues with npm, particularly related to slow build times and inefficient disk space usage. This has led to the need for exploring alternative package managers that could offer better performance and efficiency.

Decision

After evaluating various options, we have decided to adopt pnpm as our primary package manager for JavaScript projects. pnpm offers significant improvements in terms of speed and disk space utilization by leveraging hard links and a shared store for packages.

Alternatives

Bun

Bun is a fast JS runtime, bundler, and package manager. It is designed to be a drop-in replacement for npm, but it’s a very new project, so it’s not as mature as pnpm.

Consequences

The transition to pnpm is expected to result in faster build times and reduced disk space consumption for our JavaScript projects. This decision will necessitate changes in our development workflow, including updates to build scripts and CI/CD pipelines.

Migration from npm to *pnpm

For local development environments and Dockerfiles:

npm install -g pnpm
rm -rf node_modules
pnpm install
rm -rf package-lock.json

For Continuous Integration (CI) environments:

corepack enable
corepack prepare pnpm@latest-8 --activate

Additionally, we recommend updating the package.json scripts to enforce the use of pnpm and improve compatibility:

"scripts": {
  "build": "pnpm build",
  "preinstall": "npx only-allow pnpm"
}

References