pnpm 12.0.0-rc.2

pnpm 12 RC 2

on Node.js NPM

Minor Changes

• Globally installed bins can now follow the project you run them in. The new globalShims setting is a record of package names to policies that selects which globally installed packages get project-aware shims; it defaults to { node: true, deno: true, bun: true } and merges key-wise, so globalShims: { bun: false } switches one default off and globalShims: { typescript: true } adds another package. With the default, a project that pins Node.js through devEngines.runtime or engines.runtime gets the pinned stable release — authenticated against the Node.js release-team signatures — downloaded on first use and run whenever you type node inside the project, with no shell hooks. Candidates that are not signature-verified (Deno, Bun, Node.js prereleases, and ordinary package bins you enable) ask "Do you trust this project?" once per candidate and remember the answer machine-locally; the record values name the policy per package: "auto" (or its shorthand true) defers to artifact authentication, "always" switches without ever asking (useful in CI), and "prompt" always asks, even for authenticated candidates. Set globalShims: false to disable the feature, or PNPM_SHIM_BYPASS=1 to bypass it for one invocation. On Windows, programs can keep spawning the global node.exe directly, without a shell.

Patch Changes

• pnpm dlx and pnpm create no longer fail with "Failed to read patch file" in a project that has patchedDependencies. As in pnpm, the package dlx runs is installed unpatched.

• Reduced the warm startup overhead of project-aware managed runtime shims.

• ng build and nuxt build now work under the global virtual store: pnpm's built-in compatibility extensions add the tslib dependency that @angular/build uses without declaring and the unplugin dependency that @nuxt/vite-builder v4 uses without declaring.

• The automatic packageManager version switch works again on registries whose tarball URLs point at a different host than the registry itself (load-balanced feed proxies, Artifactory-style mirrors). Package-manager entries are now always recorded with integrity-only resolutions — the download URL is derived from the trusted bootstrap registry instead — and entries persisted in an invalid shape by an earlier pnpm are discarded and re-resolved instead of failing every command #13619.

• Registries that serve no npm signature metadata (private mirrors and feed proxies commonly strip dist.signatures) no longer break the automatic packageManager version switch and pnpm self-update #13147. When the configured registry cannot provide a verifiable signature, pnpm now fetches the signature from registry.npmjs.org and verifies it against the same embedded npm keys over the installed integrity — which proves exactly the same thing. If no signature can be obtained from either source (for example, both are unreachable, or the registry publishes only a shasum), pnpm proceeds with a warning instead of failing, but only when the packages resolve through a registry configured in the user's own (non-project) configuration; the download stays pinned by the lockfile integrity, and a signature that exists but does not validate still fails the switch.

• pnpm setup no longer makes Node.js print a MODULE_TYPELESS_PACKAGE_JSON warning about dist/worker.js on every command. The package.json it writes next to a standalone executable now declares "type": "module".