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.

Three 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pnpm 11.15 through 11.19 teach pnpm update and pnpm outdated to update GitHub Actions, let pnpm update write changesets for the bumps it makes, introduce cleaner update and audit settings sections, add publishConfig.name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.

pnpm 11.8 adds install dry-run previews, Node.js package map generation, richer SBOM output, pnpm view defaulting to the current package, and correct pnpm run --no-bail exit codes. It also includes a config-dependency lockfile traversal fix and many install/update determinism fixes.

pnpm 11.7 adds a frozenStore setting for installing against a read-only package store, a --batch flag for publishing a whole workspace in one request, scope-specific auth tokens, and full resolving installs delegated to pacquet. It also hardens lockfile alias handling, makes several install paths deterministic, and ships a number of publish and Windows fixes.

pnpm used to expand ${ENV_VAR} placeholders everywhere it found them — including in the .npmrc and pnpm-workspace.yaml files that live inside the repository you just cloned. That turned out to be a way for a malicious repository to steal the secrets in your environment. As of v10.34.2 and v11.5.3, pnpm stops expanding environment variables in repository-controlled registry and credential settings.

This was a security fix (GHSA-3qhv-2rgh-x77r), and it is a breaking change for some setups. This post explains the attack, what exactly changed, and how to migrate.

pnpm 11.6 adds a file-free way to supply registry authentication through npm_config_//… and pnpm_config_//… environment variables, raises the default network concurrency, and skips full re-resolution when only pnpm-lock.yaml is missing. It also infers platform fields for optional dependencies so foreign-platform binaries are never downloaded.