Determining appropriate pnpm version to use from lock file

[privatenumber]

I use npx pnpm i --frozen-lockfile in my CIs to install dependencies, but with the new pnpm v6 release that drops Node.js v10 support, installations have been breaking in projects where I test in a Node.js v10 environment.

While I am happy that Node.js v10 support is being dropped, I can imagine this being a problem again with future Node.js version deprecations.

Of course I can work around this by manually fixing the version of pnpm to install, but I was wondering if there's a "smarter" way to automatically determine which version of pnpm to use.

I checked pnpm-lock.yaml for any hints of which version of pnpm was used to create it, but the only hint I seem to get is lockfileVersion, which doesn't seem to directly correspond with the pnpm version.

Is there a way to infer or determine the version of pnpm used to create the lock file?

[zkochan]

Currently, in the docs, we recommend explicitly install a major pnpm version on CI, like:

curl -f https://get.pnpm.io/v6.js | node - add --global pnpm@6

For dev environment, I think we will recommend to use volta which will automatically pick the right pnpm version (but it does not support pnpm yet).

As for automatically installing the right pnpm version globally... I guess we could implement something like it but I am not sure how needed that is. I think it is pretty straightforward to specify which pnpm version needs to be installed.

[privatenumber]

If not currently possible, no worries. I agree it's not a major issue either.

I was also wondering if I can add some sort of pnpm version detection logic in ci, but I can just hardcode which version of Node.js is supported with which package manager versions.

Thank you @zkochan for the fast response and your hard work on pnpm -- it's everything I wish npm was!

[zkochan]

Well, maybe we could publish some distribution tags, so you could do something like install -g pnpm@node12

[privatenumber]

I test with different Node.js versions using GitHub Action's matrix feature like this, so I don't think there's a simple way to say install from pnpm@node12 without adding extra logic to make it complex.

I ended up adding this logic in npx ci, so my issue is resolved.

Thank you for your consideration!