Our move from yarn to pnpm

So we started migrating from yarn to pnpm, and everything went smoothly across all our apps and web apps. Then it came time to migrate our CI to pnpm. It was simple before to install yarn by simply using the node image on circleci.

We followed the pnpm ci integration documentation and received a write access denied error.

ERROR  No write access to the found global executable directories
The found directories:
  /usr/local/bin

Using the original code from https://pnpm.io/continuous-integration#circleci

  - restore_cache:
      name: Restore pnpm Package Cache
      keys:
        - pnpm-packages-{{ checksum "pnpm-lock.yaml" }}
  - run:
      name: Install pnpm package manager
      command: |
        curl -L https://pnpm.js.org/pnpm.js | node - add --global [email protected]
  - run:
      name: Install Dependencies
      command: |
        pnpm install
  - save_cache:
      name: Save pnpm Package Cache
      key: pnpm-packages-{{ checksum "pnpm-lock.yaml" }}
      paths:
        - node_modules

Began searching the internet for a solution.

After install, discovered a solution using "--prefix=$HOME/.local".

  - restore_cache:
      name: Restore pnpm Package Cache
      keys:
        - pnpm-packages-{{ checksum "pnpm-lock.yaml" }}
  - run:
      name: Install pnpm package manager
      command: |
        npm install --prefix=$HOME/.local [email protected] -g
  - run:
      name: Install Dependencies
      command: |
        pnpm install
  - save_cache:
      name: Save pnpm Package Cache
      key: pnpm-packages-{{ checksum "pnpm-lock.yaml" }}
      paths:
        - node_modules

You must use a cimg image that has node installed.

Once we figured that out, we were set to go, and the speed increase from yarn was noticeable.