Skip to content

document difference between pnpm and npm workspaces #662

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

Sign up for GitHub

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Draft
wants to merge 4 commits into
base: main
Choose a base branch
from
Draft

document difference between pnpm and npm workspaces #662

Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
4 commits
Select commit Hold shift + click to select a range
1967ac5
document difference between pnpm and npm workspaces
rotu Apr 18, 2025
d56e04f
Update pnpm-vs-npm.md
rotu Apr 18, 2025
e6da13f
Update pnpm-vs-npm.md
rotu Apr 18, 2025
32eae2c
Update pnpm-vs-npm.md
rotu Apr 18, 2025
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
12 changes: 12 additions & 0 deletions docs/pnpm-vs-npm.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -50,3 +50,15 @@ instance in the case of a monorepo, you should look at the documentation for
[`pnpm -r`].

[`pnpm -r`]: cli/recursive

## Workspaces

Pnpm deals with workspaces slightly differently than npm, starting with conflicting terminology:

Pnpm uses the term "workspace" to refer to a *collection* of packages, and sometimes the directory containing such packages. Pnpm uses the term "project" to refer to an individial package in the workspace tree (as contrasted to a package retrieved from a package repository like npm).

Npm uses the term "workspace" to refer to the individual packages being co-developed inside a monorepo. The "workspace root" is the package defining which packages are "workspaces" (in the npm sense).

In npm, there is a `package.json` file in the workspace root. The `"workspaces"` field in this file describes where to look for dependencies. Whenever a dependency matches the name of a workspace package, it resolves to the workspace package (regardless of the requested version).

In pnpm, the workspace root contains a `pnpm-workspaces.yaml` file. There may be a `package.json` in the same folder as `pnpm-workspaces.yaml`, but this is regarded as any other package. Workspace packages do not implicitly override registry packages by the same name - resolution depends on the package specifier.