slnpm

A simple and fast node.js package manager using symbolic link.

The design is heavily inspired by pnpm, which downloads and caches each npm package, then setup hardlink of each file to the project's node_modules. However, this package setup symbolic link (softlink) of each package's directory.

Installation

npm i -g slnpm

Feature

• save network - only need to download each package once
• save disk space - only need to store each package once
• save time - faster than npm and pnpm

Advantages over pnpm

1. This tool setup symbolic link instead of hardlink, this allows the cache to be used across different file-systems / partitions

2. This tool setup link per package (directory) instead of per file, which takes less time

Functions

• [x] install packages
  • [x] read package list from package.json
    • [x] support dependencies
    • [x] support devDependencies
    • [x] support peerDependencies
  • [x] add new packages to package.json
    • [x] save to dependencies
    • [x] save to devDependencies
    • [x] support @types shortcuts with <package>:ts and <package>:dts format to auto install @types/<package> to dependencies and devDependencies correspondingly
  • [x] support multiple source type
    • [x] npm package
    • [x] link: package*
    • [x] file: package**
  • [x] support "bin" in packages.json (setup symbolic link in node_modules/.bin)
  • [x] recursively install in every package / project
• [x] remove packages
  • [x] remove extra packages not specified in package.json
  • [x] remove specified packages from package.json

Remarks:

link: package*: the dependencies are not further installed, slnpm assumes the linked package has already been built and installed it's own dependencies

file: package**: treated same as link: package in current version

Benchmark

The benchmark is done using this package's dependencies as example.

node_modules and lock files are deleted before each run, and all packages were already cached by the installers.

The test was conducted on laptop with zst-compressed zfs and desktop with zst-compressed btrfs. The result is almost identical.

Package Installer	Time used
slnpm	0.1s
pnpm	1.6s
npm	2.1s

Remark:

• --prefer-offline flag is used in pnpm's test
• The time used is measured by the linux command time
• The time used is average of 5 runs
• slnpm actually only takes 39ms for the actual installation process but I cannot separate the time used to load dependencies from other installers so this matrix is not compared

License

This project is licensed with BSD-2-Clause

This is free, libre, and open-source software. It comes down to four essential freedoms [ref]:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others