PNPM - The minified NPM
Posted on: March 20, 2019
In this present world of web development, almost everyone might have heard the word
node_modules
They are very popular. They came with lot of advantages over CDNs. They made offline development possible. They made web development much easier and faster.
But, node_modules come with a con. They occupy space.. A lot of space. For e.g. create-react-app alone occupies ~232MB of disk space. They are making offline development possible and hence this overhead looks fine. I was happy with nodemodules until I noticed some pattern one day. I have over 30 projects on my Laptop and nodemodules alone occupied 8-10GB of my space. This made me think. Why we should have the exact copy of node_modules in every project I created. Don’t we have a provision to store everything at a single location and refer them from there.So, I started exploring and that lead me to PNPM.
pnpm
pnpm is an efficient solution to above discussed problem. It installs the required package only once in a common place and whenever we install that package in any project using npm install package-name, a hard link will be placed within node_modules folder of the project instead of installing package there. This way, it maintains only one version of each module and can effectively save lot of space in the long run.
USAGE
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installation
npm install -g pnpmIt’s as simple as that. Usage is also pretty simple. It is very easy to get switched to pnpm from npm or yarn because the commands are still gonna be the same.
pnpm run devpnpm install packageNamepnpm run buildetc..
Added advantage
pnpm comes with an added benefit apart from saving space. It is faster than npm & yarn. See the benchmark results here
Overall, I’m having great experience using pnpm. Hope you guys also like using it.
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