--ignore-workspace + allowBuilds handling in v11

[hyperknot]

One thing I was suffering on v10 was that in a monorepo I wanted one dir to be independent and use --ignore-workspace. But in that folder pnpm approve-builds didn't work, as it always created it's own pnpm-workspace.yaml file. pnpm approve-builds --ignore-workspace also didn't work.

Basically what happens with v10 is that approve-builds always creates a pnpm-workspace.yaml and then it's not used because of ignore-workspace. The problem here is that two unrelated settings are both kept in pnpm-workspace: monorepo related hierarchies + approved package list.

How does v11's revamped app allowBuilds solve this?

What I want is monorepo with centralised pnpm-workspace.yaml + one independent subdir. How can v11 solve this?

[rajputomsingh]

v11 fixes this by separating build approvals from the workspace.

You can now:

keep your root pnpm-workspace.yaml

run the subdir with --ignore-workspace
define allowBuilds locally (e.g. in .npmrc)

allow-builds = esbuild,sharp

No extra pnpm-workspace.yaml needed, and approvals work correctly.

TL;DR: in v11, build approvals are config-scoped, not workspace-scoped so your setup works cleanly now.

[anthon]

in v11, build approvals are config-scoped, not workspace-scoped

How are these different now that config is only allowed in pnpm-workspace.yaml?

[rajputomsingh]

Correction: after looking more closely, allowBuilds in pnpm v11 isn't configured through .npmrc. It is configured through workspace/project configuration such as pnpm-workspace.yaml (and supported package-level config).

The main improvement over v10 is that build approvals are managed through allowBuilds rather than the approval files generated by pnpm approve-builds. However, when using --ignore-workspace, workspace-level configuration is still not automatically applied, so any required allowBuilds configuration needs to be available in the independent project context.