Why I Switched from npm to pnpm
After years of using npm (and a brief stint with Yarn), I switched to pnpm on all my projects about six months ago. Here’s the short version of why I’m not going back.
Disk space. pnpm uses a global content-addressable store, so packages are never duplicated across projects. If ten projects depend on lodash@4.17.21, there’s exactly one copy on disk. My SSD thanks me daily.
Speed. Installation is noticeably faster, especially on CI where cache hits are common.
Strict by default. npm and Yarn hoist packages in a way that lets you silently depend on things you never declared. pnpm’s isolated node_modules structure catches these phantom dependencies immediately, which surfaces real bugs early.
Switching is straightforward:
npm install -g pnpm
pnpm import # converts existing package-lock.json
pnpm install
The CLI is nearly identical to npm, so the learning curve is basically zero. Give it a try on your next project.
About
Network Entropology (n.): The study of chaos in data network systems; the discipline concerned with understanding how order degrades, complexity accumulates, and entropy propagates across connected infrastructure, and the practice of bringing order back to it. A field that exists whether or not its practitioners know they are in it.