Mise Lang Node Packages

The pick

• Default for new projects: pnpm. Fastest install, strictest dep resolution (catches phantom deps), best monorepo story. Used by every large JS project that's switched in the last 3 years.
• Corporate / "we use npm because that's what ships": npm. Fine. It's improved a lot.
• Long-lived yarn codebases: yarn berry (v4+). Don't migrate away just for the sake of it; the cost is rarely worth it.
• Bun curious: bun for personal projects and greenfield. It's fast and increasingly capable but still has compatibility edges. Verify your deps work before committing a team to it.

Never mix two package managers in one project — pick one lockfile and commit only that.

The pinning story — corepack + packageManager

Since Node 16.9, corepack ships with Node. It reads packageManager from package.json and shims pnpm / yarn / npm to the exact version specified:

{
  "packageManager": "[email protected]"
}

With corepack enable run once, typing pnpm install in the project directory runs pnpm 9.14.2 specifically. No npm install -g pnpm. No drift. No "what version is on CI vs dev".

This is the way to pin package managers as of 2026. Use it.

Wiring corepack via mise

[tools]
node = "24"

[hooks]
enter = "corepack enable 2>/dev/null || true"

[hooks] enter runs when mise activates the directory — once per shell session entering the dir. corepack enable is idempotent, so running it on every enter is safe. The || true prevents a stale corepack install from breaking the hook.

When to use mise's npm: backend

mise has an npm: backend for installing npm packages as global CLIs managed by mise:

[tools]
node = "24"
"npm:typescript" = "5.6"
"npm:prettier" = "3.4"
"npm:@anthropic-ai/claude-code" = "latest"
"npm:vercel" = "latest"

Use npm: for:

• Global CLIs you'd otherwise npm install -g.
• Tools shared across many projects (claude-code, vercel, netlify-cli).
• Dotfiles config (~/.config/mise/config.toml).

Don't use npm: for:

• Project dependencies — those go in package.json.
• Tools that need to integrate with the project's node_modules (e.g. a linter plugin that depends on eslint from the project) — the mise-installed copy lives in a separate prefix and won't see project modules.

Monorepos

pnpm workspaces (recommended)

# pnpm-workspace.yaml