package.json keeps my pnpm version artificially old

[hyperknot]

I opened this issue in pnpm but it seems it's more related to corepack.

https://github.com/orgs/pnpm/discussions/8911#discussioncomment-11674247

Copying it here:

---

1. I go to any repo, with package.json
2. I run pnpm i
3. It adds this "packageManager": "[email protected]+sha512...." line
4. From now on: 1. it keeps annoying me with the "Please update pnpm with corepack" notice AND 2. it doesn't get updated.

By "doesn't get updated" I mean that even though I've updated my pnpm to the latest version, when I go inside that directory, it reports it as 9.10, not as 9.15.

Even though I'm running on the very same binary file!

Outside the project repo:

/Users/user/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/pnpm --version
9.15.1

Inside the project repo:

/Users/user/.nvm/versions/node/v20.17.0/bin/pnpm --version
9.10.0

This is extremely buggy / confusing like this. How can the same binary file have multiple versions?

[arcanis]

This is extremely buggy / confusing like this. How can the same binary file have multiple versions?

That's literally the point of Corepack. It uses the version configured for a given project, not whatever random version happens to be globally installed. The binary you see is not the final one. The final ones are in ~/.cache/node/corepack/pnpm, and which one is used depends on the packageManager field.

So if you want to upgrade pnpm, just do what pnpm says; it'll upgrade the packageManager field.