Building pnpm from source (without pnpm)

[taylorjdawson]

We are looking to build pnpm from source, however, it looks like you need pnpm to build pnpm. Is there a way for us to build pnpm without using pnpm? This is a boot strapping issue.

I couldn't locate in the repo the code for the pnpm compile command if someone could point me to where that is.

[zkochan]

No, I don't think you could. But you can do npx pnpm install and so on. So technically you wouldn't install pnpm just run npx.

[rastagraffix]

This all assumes there is already a pre-built package. For OpenBSD, there isn't. That's why we need to figure out how to build this monster from scratch.

[zkochan]

We could commit a compiled pnpm to the repository, I guess.

[rastagraffix]

Well, that would solve the immediate problem, I guess. There would need to be binaries for arm64 and amd64.

But that doesn’t solve the underlying problem: explaining how to build pnpm from scratch. If I knew how to do that, I could create an OpenBSD port for this that would merge into the ports tree, making it available to everyone running OpenBSD. Same for FreeBSD. And Solaris. Etc.

[zkochan]

you can download the pnpm artefacts from the release page and use it to build pnpm.

[lrvick]

This would not be a solution at any of the orgs I support, or in the Linux distro I maintain, which all have supply chain integrity standards that forbid trusting third party compiled binaries. How would anyone know that binary you upload was not tampered with?

There must be a way to bootstrap pnpm from source. How was the first version of pnpm built?

[rastagraffix]

I have already downloaded the source code. The issue is THERE ARE NO INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO BUILD IT.

I don't know how to make this any simpler or clearer.