How is the lockfileVersion in the pnpm-lock.yaml determined?

[Aghassi]

I'm asking this question because of an issue I hit here aspect-build/rules_js#1174

TL;DR is that 8.6.0 generated lockfileVersion of 6.1 and 8.6.10 generated lockfileVersion of 6.0

[zkochan]

Sometimes there are some new fields in the lockfile but otherwise the lockfile is backward compatible, so it can be used with previous versions of pnpm. In this case, a new settings field was added to the lockfile. However, we had to change the lockfile version back as there is a bug in pnpm v8. It thinks that 6.1 is a breaking change.

[KSXGitHub]

Normally, spec version do not contain minor ver, especially ones that are generated by machine. Examples: yarn.lock, package-lock.json.

[Aghassi]

Thanks for the explanation! If I had not had a lockfile up to date check on CI I wouldn't have hit this. It is unfortunate a patch version caused this regression, but I'm glad it was fixed. Also helped us remember to enforce corepack and encode your pnpm versions

[EndangeredMassa]

Lockfiles are not necessarily backwards compatible, depending on how exactly you interpret term. Note that some pnpm versions cannot parse old lockfile versions.
See: pnpm/spec#7

[zkochan]

in the future lockfile version will equal the pnpm version in which it got introduced. The current lockfileVersion is 9.0 as it was released with pnpm v9.0

[helloint]

@zkochan will it related to the node version?
I asked because I want to know if have nvm installed to manage different node in different project. Then to avoid install pnpm on each node env, I want to install pnpm on Homebrew. I noticed pnpm needs node as well, so I also installed node on Homebrew, the latest version is node 22. This way, on every node/npm projects, I will have pnpm available from Homebrew. I hope this is fine to go.