⚠️ Security fix — environment variables in a project .npmrc (action may be required)

Following GHSA-3qhv-2rgh-x77r, pnpm no longer expands ${ENV_VAR} placeholders that come from a repository-controlled config file, because a malicious repository could otherwise use them to leak your environment secrets (npm tokens, CI job tokens, etc.) to an attacker-controlled registry during install. This applies to:

• the project/workspace .npmrc — registry, @scope:registry, proxy URLs, URL-scoped keys (//host/…), and credential values (_authToken, _auth, _password, username, tokenHelper, cert, key);
• registry URLs in pnpm-workspace.yaml.

This release also closes a bypass where a project .npmrc could set userconfig, globalconfig, or prefix to make pnpm load a repo-supplied file as trusted config (via @pnpm/[email protected]).

Environment variables are still expanded in trusted config: your user-level ~/.npmrc, the global config, CLI options, and environment config.

If your authentication broke after upgrading, move the token out of the committed .npmrc:

# Writes to your user/global config, not the repository:
pnpm config set "//registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken" "$NPM_TOKEN"

Or keep the ${NPM_TOKEN} line but put it in your user-level ~/.npmrc instead of the repo. In GitHub Actions, actions/setup-node with registry-url already writes a user-level .npmrc, so NODE_AUTH_TOKEN keeps working. For other CI where editing each pipeline is hard, set NPM_CONFIG_USERCONFIG=.npmrc in the CI environment to declare the project .npmrc trusted.

See https://pnpm.io/npmrc for full migration details.

Patch Changes

• Improved the warning printed when a project .npmrc uses an environment variable in a registry/proxy URL or in registry credentials. The message now explains why the setting was ignored and how to migrate it to a trusted source — for example by running pnpm config set "<key>" <value> to store it in the global config, or by keeping the ${...} line in the user-level ~/.npmrc — with a link to https://pnpm.io/npmrc.
• A repository-controlled project or workspace .npmrc can no longer redirect which files pnpm loads as its trusted user and global configuration. Previously such a file could set userconfig, globalconfig, or prefix to point at an attacker-supplied file shipped in the repository, and pnpm would load it as a trusted config source — bypassing the protection that prevents repository config from expanding environment variables into registry request destinations and credentials, and allowing it to set tokenHelper. The user/global config file locations are now resolved only from trusted sources (CLI options, environment config, the npm builtin config, and defaults) before the project and workspace .npmrc files are read. Fixed by upgrading @pnpm/npm-conf to 3.0.3.

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