how to configure using environment variables

[batusai513]

Hello, I'm trying to figure out how to configure pnpm using environment variables, I've checked the documentation and it seems possible:

pnpm gets its configuration from the command line, environment variables, and .npmrc files

but it is not very clear how to achieve this, I suppose that as in npm, all configs will be prefixed, so for store-dir will become pnpn_config_store_dir, but that did not seems to work, what is the correct format to configure pnpm using env variables and what configs can be change using this method?

what I want to achieve is to configure pnpm to not move anything that writes into disk to /tmp/.pnpm folder

store-dir=/tmp/.pnpm/store
modules-dir=/tmp/.pnpm/node_modules
global-dir=/tmp/.pnpm/global
global-bin-dir=/tmp/.pnpm
state-dir=/tmp/.pnpm
cache-dir=/tmp/.pnpm/cache

I also tried adding all of those as command line arguments, but discovered that global-bin-dir and state-dir are treated as unknown arguments by the cli

Thanks.

[AstroGD]

Hey there,
Found your issue and figured out how it works, so I thought I'll share:

You have to prefix the config vars with npm_config_ and replace all - with _.
So the store-dir option becomes the npm_config_store_dir environment variable.

Hope this helps ^^

[unikitty37]

For those that have had difficulty working out how to set command-line options (or even the prefix mentioned above), it appears the pnpm documentation is based on the npm documentation, except the two paragraphs that tell you how to do it are missing from the pnpm version.

https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/using-npm/config#command-line-flags has the information, and could probably do with being added to the pnpm documentation as well 🙂