pnpm: A TypeScript repository from gelxgx

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Fast, disk space efficient package manager:

Fast. Up to 2x faster than the alternatives (see benchmark).
Efficient. Files inside node_modules are linked from a single content-addressable storage.
Great for monorepos.
Strict. A package can access only dependencies that are specified in its package.json.
Deterministic. Has a lockfile called pnpm-lock.yaml.
Works as a Node.js version manager. See pnpm env use.
Works everywhere. Supports Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Battle-tested. Used in production by teams of all sizes since 2016.

To quote the Rush team:

Microsoft uses pnpm in Rush repos with hundreds of projects and hundreds of PRs per day, and we’ve found it to be very fast and reliable.

Background

pnpm uses a content-addressable filesystem to store all files from all module directories on a disk. When using npm or Yarn, if you have 100 projects using lodash, you will have 100 copies of lodash on disk. With pnpm, lodash will be stored in a content-addressable storage, so:

If you depend on different versions of lodash, only the files that differ are added to the store. If lodash has 100 files, and a new version has a change only in one of those files, pnpm update will only add 1 new file to the storage.
All the files are saved in a single place on the disk. When packages are installed, their files are linked from that single place consuming no additional disk space. Linking is performed using either hard-links or reflinks (copy-on-write).

As a result, you save gigabytes of space on your disk and you have a lot faster installations! If you'd like more details about the unique node_modules structure that pnpm creates and why it works fine with the Node.js ecosystem, read this small article: Flat node_modules is not the only way.

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