pnpm 12 is stable. It is a rewrite of pnpm in Rust, and it is deliberately not a migration: the commands, flags, settings, and lockfile format of pnpm 11 all carry over, and the documentation describes both versions.

The short list of things that genuinely behave differently is in What's different in pnpm 12. This post covers what pnpm 12 adds that pnpm 11 never shipped.

pnpm 11.24 brings back pnpm approve-builds --global, which isolated global installs took away in v11.0, and makes recursive batch publishing group its packages by registry so a credential mismatch is caught before anything is published. It also stops --frozen-lockfile from failing over the pnpm version the lockfile pins.

pnpm 11.23 gives the registries setting a shape that describes each registry once — its tarball layout, the scopes routed to it, the prefix it answers to — so an Artifactory or GitLab registry can finally keep its tarball URLs out of pnpm-lock.yaml. It adds virtualStoreType, makes undeclared imports resolve under ESM with the global virtual store without a plugin, teaches pnpm config get to report the settings pnpm actually acts on, and warns about settings no pnpm version recognizes.

pnpm 11.21 and 11.22 teach pnpm install to update the lockfile in place for most everyday changes instead of re-resolving the whole dependency graph, stop recording SSH URLs that break installs on CI, make global installs switch over atomically and global interactive updates select whole install groups, add pnpm cache path, and take away a project's ability to relocate pnpm's machine-level state through pnpm-workspace.yaml.

pnpm 12 is a rewrite of pnpm in Rust, and it is currently a release candidate. Upgrading is not meant to be a migration: apart from the differences below, it keeps the commands, flags, settings, and lockfile format of pnpm 11, and the documentation applies to both versions.

Five things differ, and one of them — a removed flag — fails outright rather than behaving differently. This post collects them in one place.

pnpm 11.20 fixes a package-substitution risk in projects that install from more than one registry: packages resolved from a named registry are now recorded in the lockfile under registry-qualified keys. It also adds a built-in npmjs: alias, stops empty proxy settings from failing installs, hardens pnpm rebuild against a malicious lockfile, and speeds up dependency resolution.

pnpm 11.15 through 11.19 teach pnpm update and pnpm outdated to update GitHub Actions, let pnpm update write changesets for the bumps it makes, introduce cleaner update and audit settings sections, add publishConfig.name for publishing a package under a different name, harden pnpm self-update against project-supplied configuration, make web-based login work without a TTY, and accept = as a save-prefix. They also cut peak resolution memory by several times on large workspaces and speed up repeat installs after compatible dependency changes.

pnpm 11.11 through 11.14 add native workspace release management (pnpm change, pnpm lane, and a bare pnpm version -r), a pnpm doctor command that diagnoses your installation end to end, the pnpm access and pnpm team commands for managing packages and organizations on the registry, convergence overrides, and scheme-carrying peerDependencies specifiers. They also fix a path-traversal vulnerability, cut peak memory during cold-cache resolution by roughly 30%, and resolve a peer dependency deadlock.

pnpm 11.10 adds the _auth setting for CI-friendly registry authentication, new pnpm prefix and pnpm issues commands, and the ability for pnpm self-update to install pnpm v12 (the Rust port). It also improves pnpm up accuracy, speeds up resolution against registries that ignore abbreviated metadata, and hardens global package management, pnpm deploy, and pnpm pack-app.

pnpm 11.9 computes missing tarball integrity for registries that cannot publish checksums, adds pnpm sbom --exclude-peers, improves audit performance on cyclic lockfiles, fixes peer-resolution nondeterminism, and tightens exclusion handling for minimumReleaseAge and trustPolicy.