Volta error: Could not locate executable pnpm in your project

[Mr-xzq]

Even if you have pnpm installed globally.

When you set packageManager and pnpm as devDependencies in package.json:

{
  "packageManager": "[email protected]",
  "devDependencies": {
    "pnpm": "7.9.0",
   }
}

Then you run command in project:

pnpm install

Error Info:

Volta error: Could not locate executable `pnpm` in your project.

Please ensure that all project dependencies are installed with `npm install` or `yarn install`

Is it related to this?
https://docs.volta.sh/guide/understanding#managing-your-project

[charlespierce]

Hi @Mr-xzq, thanks for the question! There are a couple of connected issues here:

1. Volta doesn't currently support pnpm special-cased as a package manager like yarn and npm. There's a PR open to add that, however even when it does, Volta also doesn't use the packageManager key, rather it uses the volta key as described in the "Managing Your Project" section you linked.
2. For global packages (which is how Volta currently treats pnpm, given the first issue), if a project has a dependency on a binary (like you have with pnpm in devDependencies, then Volta will attempt to delegate to the local version. However, in this case, the package manager itself is what is listed as a dependency, so it's a bit of a dependency loop.

For the time being, I believe it should work to use the global default version of pnpm if you remove the devDependencies entry for pnpm. Longer-term, once #1273 lands then we'll directly support pinning pnpm via volta pin pnpm. We also can separately investigate using packageManager as a source of truth, but there's still some outstanding design that needs to be done on using separate sources of truth (see #282 for that tracking issue).

[Mr-xzq]

Hi @charlespierce, thank you very much for your answer!

Your answer solved my question very well!

I just need to remove pnpm in devDependencies:

{
  "devDependencies": {
--    "pnpm": "7.9.0",
   }
}

Looking forward to the follow-up progress of Volta's support for pnpm. #1273

[FiringJ]

tks. after i delete 'pnpm' in devDependencies, pnpm install works.

[jxxl998]

thx, same problem here but works fine after deleting devDependencies, still, i don't fully understand why it will result in dependency loop 🤔