pnpm

pnpm
Developers	Zoltan Kochan and other contributors
Release	28 June 2017 (2017-06-28)
Stable release	10.33.0  / 24 March 2026 (24 March 2026)
Written in	TypeScript, JavaScript
Platform	Cross-platform
Type	Package manager
License	MIT License
Website	pnpm.io
Repository	github.com/pnpm/pnpm

pnpm (short for Performant npm) is one of the main JavaScript package managers, originally developed in 2016 by Rico Sta. Cruz for the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment. It focuses on being a disk space-efficient alternative to npm.

History

The first commit to the pnpm repository was made on 27 January 2016, the same year as Yarn. The pnpm project was inspired by Alexander Gugel’s ied – an early experiment that used symbolic links to organise node_modules. The first stable release (v1.0.0) arrived on 28 June 2017. Over the following years, pnpm gained traction for its novel approach to dependency hoisting and its ability to handle large monorepos efficiently.

Technical design

pnpm's core innovation is its use of a global content-addressable store to manage dependencies. Instead of copying files into each project's node_modules folder, it stores a single copy of each package version in a central location (e.g., ~/.pnpm-store) and creates hard links from the project to these files. Symbolic links are then used to construct the dependency tree within the project.

See also

• Bun
• npm
• Yarn

External links

• Official website
• pnpm on GitHub