Patch Changes

• Stopped expanding environment variables in repository-controlled registry/proxy request destinations and registry credential values from .npmrc, and in workspace registry URLs from pnpm-workspace.yaml. Move dynamic registry URL and token configuration to trusted user, global, CLI, or environment config.

• Resolve package-manager bootstrap dependencies with trusted user or CLI registry and network config, and reject package-manager env-lockfile records that do not use registry package paths with integrity-only resolutions before auto-switch execution.

• Avoid writing packageManagerDependencies to pnpm-lock.yaml when package manager policy is set to onFail: ignore or pmOnFail: ignore #12228.

• Avoid running dependency-status auto-install when the dependency status is unavailable without a project manifest.

• Using the $ version reference syntax in overrides (e.g. "react": "$react") now prints a deprecation warning. The syntax still works, but catalogs are the recommended way to keep an overridden version in sync with the rest of the workspace. Reference a catalog entry with the catalog: protocol instead.

• Fixed pnpm config get globalconfig to return the global config.yaml path again pnpm/pnpm#11962.

• Fixed bare --color so it does not consume the following CLI flag, allowing command shorthands like --parallel to expand correctly and forms like pnpm --color with current <command> to dispatch the inner command instead of failing with MISSING_WITH_CURRENT_CMD.

• Fix pnpm install ignoring enableGlobalVirtualStore toggle by including it in the workspace state settings check #12142.

• Security: pnpm now verifies the npm registry signature of a package-manager binary before spawning it, so a cloned repository cannot make pnpm download and execute an arbitrary native binary.

  This covers two paths that select an executable from repository-controlled input:

  • pacquet install engine — declaring pacquet (or @pnpm/pacquet) in configDependencies opts in to pnpm's Rust install engine. pnpm now verifies that the installed pacquet shim and the host's @pacquet/<platform>-<arch> binary carry a valid npm registry signature for their exact name@version, and refuses to run pacquet (failing the command) if the signature does not verify or cannot be checked. The only graceful fallback to pnpm's own engine is when pacquet has no binary for the current platform.
  • automatic version switch / self-update — the packageManager / devEngines.packageManager field makes pnpm download and run a specific pnpm version. pnpm now verifies the registry signature of pnpm, @pnpm/exe, and the host platform binary before installing/spawning them, and refuses to run an engine whose signature does not match a published, signed release. The check runs only on an actual download (store cache miss), so it does not add a network round trip to every command.

  In both cases the signature is verified over the installed integrity, against npm's public signing keys that ship embedded in the pnpm CLI (like corepack), so bytes substituted via a tampered lockfile or a repository-controlled registry fail verification — and a registry the user did not vouch for cannot supply its own signing keys. The signed packument is fetched from the configured registry, so an npm mirror works transparently. Verification fails closed: if it cannot be completed (for example, the registry is unreachable), the command fails rather than running an unverified binary. The embedded keys are kept current by a release-time check against npm's signing-keys endpoint.

• Made peer-dependent deduplication deterministic. When a peer-suffixed package variant was a subset of two or more mutually incompatible larger variants, the variant it collapsed into depended on the order importers were resolved in, which varies between machines. This could resolve the same workspace to different lockfiles on different platforms and make pnpm dedupe --check alternate between passing and failing.

• Reject invalid package names and versions from staged tarball manifests before deriving filenames for pnpm stage download.

• Clarified in CLI help that the pnpm store is trusted shared state and store integrity checks are corruption detection, not a tamper boundary for untrusted store writers.

• Reject reserved manifest bin names ("", ".", "..", and scoped forms such as @scope/..) when resolving a package's bins. These names previously passed the bin-name guard and, when joined to the global bin directory during global remove/update/add operations, could resolve to the global bin directory itself or its parent and have it recursively deleted.

• Require trusted package identity before package-name allowBuilds entries can approve lifecycle scripts for git, git-hosted tarball, direct tarball, and local directory artifacts. To approve one of those artifacts explicitly, use its peer-suffix-free lockfile depPath as the allowBuilds key. Lockfile verification now rejects lockfiles where a registry-style dependency path (name@semver) is backed by a git, directory, or git-hosted tarball resolution (ERR_PNPM_RESOLUTION_SHAPE_MISMATCH), so the dependency path is a reliable artifact identity by the time scripts can run.

• Security: pnpm now verifies the OpenPGP signature of a downloaded Node.js runtime's SHASUMS256.txt before trusting its integrity hashes.

  When a repository requests a Node.js runtime (e.g. via devEngines.runtime / useNodeVersion), the download mirror is repository-configurable through node-mirror:<channel>. The integrity of the downloaded binary was only checked against SHASUMS256.txt fetched from that same mirror — a circular check that a malicious mirror could satisfy by serving a tampered binary together with a matching SHASUMS256.txt. pnpm then executes the binary (for example to run lifecycle scripts).

  pnpm now fetches SHASUMS256.txt.sig and verifies the detached OpenPGP signature against the Node.js release team's public keys, which ship embedded in the pnpm CLI. A mirror that serves a tampered binary cannot also produce a valid signature, so the download fails to verify. The embedded keys are kept current by a release-time check against the canonical nodejs/release-keys list.

  The musl variants from the hardcoded unofficial-builds.nodejs.org mirror are not repository-configurable and are signed by a different key, so they continue to be trusted over TLS.

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