Workspace

pnpm has built-in support for monorepositories (AKA multi-package repositories, multi-project repositories, or monolithic repositories). You can create a workspace to unite multiple projects inside a single repository.

A workspace must have a pnpm-workspace.yaml file in its root. A workspace also may have an .npmrc in its root.

tip

If you are looking into monorepo management, you might also want to look into Bit. Bit uses pnpm under the hood but automates a lot of the things that are currently done manually in a traditional workspace managed by pnpm/npm/Yarn. There’s an article about bit install that talks about it: Painless Monorepo Dependency Management with Bit.

Workspace protocol (workspace:)

By default, pnpm will link packages from the workspace if the available packages match the declared ranges. For instance, foo@1.0.0 is linked into bar if bar has "foo": "^1.0.0" in its dependencies and foo@1.0.0 is in the workspace. However, if bar has "foo": "2.0.0" in dependencies and foo@2.0.0 is not in the workspace, foo@2.0.0 will be installed from the registry. This behavior introduces some uncertainty.

Luckily, pnpm supports the workspace: protocol. When this protocol is used, pnpm will refuse to resolve to anything other than a local workspace package. So, if you set "foo": "workspace:2.0.0", this time installation will fail because "foo@2.0.0" isn’t present in the workspace.

This protocol is especially useful when the link-workspace-packages option is set to false. In that case, pnpm will only link packages from the workspace if the workspace: protocol is used.

Referencing workspace packages through aliases

Let’s say you have a package in the workspace named foo. Usually, you would reference it as "foo": "workspace:*".

If you want to use a different alias, the following syntax will work too: "bar": "workspace:foo@*".

Before publish, aliases are converted to regular aliased dependencies. The above example will become: "bar": "npm:foo@1.0.0".

Referencing workspace packages through their relative path

In a workspace with 2 packages:

+ packages
    + foo
    + bar

bar may have foo in its dependencies declared as "foo": "workspace:../foo". Before publishing, these specs are converted to regular version specs supported by all package managers.

Publishing workspace packages

When a workspace package is packed into an archive (whether it’s through pnpm pack or one of the publish commands like pnpm publish), we dynamically replace any workspace: dependency by:

• The corresponding version in the target workspace (if you use workspace:*, workspace:~, or workspace:^)
• The associated semver range (for any other range type)

So for example, if we have foo, bar, qar, zoo in the workspace and they all are at version 1.5.0, the following:

{
    "dependencies": {
        "foo": "workspace:*",
        "bar": "workspace:~",
        "qar": "workspace:^",
        "zoo": "workspace:^1.5.0"
    }
}

Will be transformed into:

{
    "dependencies": {
        "foo": "1.5.0",
        "bar": "~1.5.0",
        "qar": "^1.5.0",
        "zoo": "^1.5.0"
    }
}

This feature allows you to depend on your local workspace packages while still being able to publish the resulting packages to the remote registry without needing intermediary publish steps - your consumers will be able to use your published workspaces as any other package, still benefitting from the guarantees semver offers.

Release workflow

Versioning packages inside a workspace is a complex task and pnpm currently does not provide a built-in solution for it. However, there are 2 well tested tools that handle versioning and support pnpm:

• changesets
• Rush.

For how to set up a repository using Rush, read this page.

For using Changesets with pnpm, read this guide.

Troubleshooting

pnpm cannot guarantee that scripts will be run in topological order if there are cycles between workspace dependencies. If pnpm detects cyclic dependencies during installation, it will produce a warning. If pnpm is able to find out which dependencies are causing the cycles, it will display them too.

If you see the message There are cyclic workspace dependencies, please inspect workspace dependencies declared in dependencies, optionalDependencies and devDependencies.

Usage examples

Here are a few of the most popular open source projects that use the workspace feature of pnpm:

Project	Stars	Migration date	Migration commit
Next.js		2022-05-29	f7b81316aea4fc9962e5e54981a6d559004231aa
Vite		2021-09-26	3e1cce01d01493d33e50966d0d0fd39a86d229f9
Nuxt		2022-10-17	74a90c566c936164018c086030c7de65b26a5cb6
Vue 3.0		2021-10-09	61c5fbd3e35152f5f32e95bf04d3ee083414cecb
Prisma		2021-09-21	c4c83e788aa16d61bae7a6d00adc8a58b3789a06
n8n		2022-11-09	736777385c54d5b20174c9c1fda38bb31fbf14b4
Slidev		2021-04-12	d6783323eb1ab1fc612577eb63579c8f7bc99c3a
Astro		2022-03-08	240d88aefe66c7d73b9c713c5da42ae789c011ce
Turborepo		2022-03-02	fd171519ec02a69c9afafc1bc5d9d1b481fba721
Element Plus		2021-09-23	f9e192535ff74d1443f1d9e0c5394fad10428629
Verdaccio		2021-09-21	9dbf73e955fcb70b0a623c5ab89649b95146c744
NextAuth.js		2022-05-03	4f29d39521451e859dbdb83179756b372e3dd7aa
VueUse		2021-09-25	826351ba1d9c514e34426c85f3d69fb9875c7dd9
SvelteKit		2021-09-26	b164420ab26fa04fd0fbe0ac05431f36a89ef193
Cycle.js		2021-09-21	f2187ab6688368edb904b649bd371a658f6a8637
Vercel		2023-01-12	9c768b98b71cfc72e8638bf5172be88c39e8fa69
Vitest		2021-12-13	d6ff0ccb819716713f5eab5c046861f4d8e4f988
Milkdown		2021-09-26	4b2e1dd6125bc2198fd1b851c4f00eda70e9b913
Nhost		2022-02-07	10a1799a1fef2f558f737de3bb6cadda2b50e58f
Logto		2021-07-29	0b002e07850c8e6d09b35d22fab56d3e99d77043
ByteMD		2021-02-18	36ef25f1ea1cd0b08752df5f8c832302017bb7fb
Rollup plugins		2021-09-21	53fb18c0c2852598200c547a0b1d745d15b5b487
icestark		2021-12-16	4862326a8de53d02f617e7b1986774fd7540fccd