Workspace

pnpm supports concurrent actions in multi-package repositories (workspaces).

By default, when you run the pnpm recursive [action] commands, all the directories are searched for packages (directories with package.json file). From v1.35.0, you can control what directories are searched by passing an array of globs to packages in pnpm-workspace.yaml.

An example of a pnpm-workspace.yaml:

packages:
  # the root package.json
  - '.'
  # all packages in subdirs of packages/ and components/
  - 'packages/**'
  - 'components/**'
  # exclude packages that are inside test/ directories
  - '!**/test/**'

pnpm-workspace.yaml should be in the root of the workspace.

Linking packages inside a workspace

(This example will work with pnpm v2.14.0 or newer)

When working inside a workspace, you want your dependencies to be linked from the monorepo but declared as regular dependencies. Let's suppose that you have this workspace:

.
├─ pnpm-workspace.yaml
└─ packages
   ├─ car
   └─ garage

If you create a .npmrc file in the root of your repository and set the value of link-workspace-packages to true, the install command will try to find packages in the repository before resolving them from the registry.

So when you run pnpm install car in /packages/garage, pnpm will link car to garage/node_modules/car from packages/car. Even though car will be linked, it will be added as a regular semver dependency to the dependencies of garage. So if the version of car in the workspace is 1.0.0 then this is how the package.json of garage will look like after running pnpm install car:

{
  "name": "garage",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "dependencies": {
    "car": "^1.0.0"
  }
}

Using a shared shrinkwrap.yaml

As of v2, pnpm creates a dedicated shrinkwrap.yaml and node_modules folder for each workspace package by default. But from v2.17.0, it is possible to add shared-workspace-shrinkwrap=true to the root .npmrc of your monorepo. When and shared-workspace-shrinkwrap is true, packages use a single shrinkwrap.yaml in the root of the monorepo. This config will be true by default from pnpm v3.