pnpm vs npm

Struttura flat di npm#

npm maintains a flattened dependency tree as of version 3. This leads to less disk space bloat, with a messy node_modules directory as a side effect.

On the other hand, pnpm manages node_modules by using hard linking and symbolic linking to a global on-disk content-addressable store. This lets you get the benefits of far less disk space usage, while also keeping your node_modules clean. There is documentation on the store layout if you wish to learn more.

The good thing about pnpm's proper node_modules structure is that it "helps to avoid silly bugs" by making it impossible to use modules that are not specified in the project's package.json.

Installazione#

pnpm does not allow installation of packages without saving them to package.json. If no parameters are passed to pnpm add, packages are saved as regular dependencies. Like with npm, --save-dev and --save-optional can be used to install packages as dev or optional dependencies.

Come conseguenza di questa limitazione, i progetti non avranno alcun pacchetto estraneo quando usano pnpm a meno che non rimuovano una dipendenza e la lascino orfana. That's why pnpm's implementation of the prune command does not allow you to specify packages to prune - it ALWAYS removes all extraneous and orphaned packages.

Dipendenze nella cartella#

Directory dependencies start with the file: prefix and point to a directory in the filesystem. Come npm, pnpm collega simbolicamente queste dipendenze. A differenza di npm, pnpm non esegue l'installazione per le dipendenze dei file.

This means that if you have a package called foo (<root>/foo) that has bar@file:../bar as a dependency, pnpm won't perform installation for <root>/bar when you run pnpm install on foo.

If you need to run installations in several packages at the same time, for instance in the case of a monorepo, you should look at the documentation for pnpm -r.