Corepack is the package manager for your package manager. If you cannot decide between npm, yarn or pnpm then this might be for you.

Corepack is bundled with Node (19+). It adds metadata to your package.json file to tell CI and engineers which package manager you should be using.

Why Use Corepack?

• Team consistency: Everyone uses the same package manager version
• CI/CD reliability: Your builds use the exact same tools locally and in production
• Onboarding simplicity: New developers get the right tools automatically

Prerequisites

It is recommended, although not mandatory, (your mileage may vary) that you uninstall pnpm and yarn before proceeding.

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npm uninstall -g yarn pnpm

Getting Started

Enabling corepack on a project is as simple as running one command:

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corepack enable

Congratulations, you have now enabled corepack!

Doing Stuff

Big deal, right? Nothing has happened. Correct, but try this:

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corepack use pnpm@latest

Congrats, your project now uses the pnpm latest version try pnpm i.

If you get bored of pnpm, you can try yarn:

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corepack use yarn@latest

It’s as easy as that.

How does it work?

When a teammate clones your repo and runs npm install, Corepack will:

1. Detect your packageManager field specifies pnpm for example
2. Block the command with: “This project is configured to use pnpm because package.json has a ‘packageManager’ field”
3. Force them to run pnpm install instead
4. Automatically download [email protected] if they don’t have it

Things to Know

• Corepack requires Node.js 16.9+ (bundled with 19+)
• Some CI environments may need corepack enable in their setup
• You can still use npm commands, but Corepack will redirect to your chosen manager

Future Excerice

Why not write a Github action to install, build, test, package and publish a project but be package manager agnostic?