pnpm Migration

Dyad manages its own copy of pnpm (currently pnpm 11) to install your app's dependencies safely. Some projects — usually apps imported from GitHub or created with older tools — were set up with an older pnpm and carry one or both of:

• a packageManager field in package.json pinned to pnpm 8 or older
• a pnpm-lock.yaml with a lockfile format older than 9.0

That combination causes a subtle problem: when Dyad installs your dependencies, pnpm 11 upgrades pnpm-lock.yaml to the 9.0 format. But everything outside Dyad — Vercel, GitHub Actions, and teammates using corepack — follows your project's pinned pnpm version, and pnpm 8 cannot read a 9.0 lockfile. The app keeps working inside Dyad while deploys and CI fail with lockfile errors.

The migration fixes this by making everything agree: it updates the packageManager pin to the pnpm version Dyad actually runs and rewrites the lockfile to match, in one visible commit.

pnpm 11 requires Node.js 22 or newer. Before you migrate, make sure your local development environment, CI workflow, and deploy platform all run Node 22+. If an external tool is still on Node 18, 20, or 21, Corepack, Vercel, or GitHub Actions can fail before dependencies install because they try to start pnpm 11 on an unsupported Node version.

If your project is pinned to pnpm 9 or 10, you don't need this upgrade — pnpm 9, 10, and 11 all share the 9.0 lockfile format, so nothing breaks.

Quick upgrade

Dyad provides a one-click upgrade.

Before starting, update any Node version pin for your app and deployment pipeline to Node 22 or newer. This can include .nvmrc, .node-version, engines.node in package.json, the Node version configured in Vercel, and the node-version used by actions/setup-node in GitHub Actions.

Go to the App Details page by clicking on your app name in the top-left corner.

At the bottom of the app details page, you will see an Upgrades section. Look for the upgrade named Migrate to pnpm 11 and click Upgrade.

Dyad will:

1. Update the packageManager field in package.json to the pnpm version Dyad runs
2. Reinstall your dependencies so pnpm-lock.yaml is rewritten to the matching format
3. Commit both files together as [dyad] migrate to pnpm 11

If it succeeds and your deploy or CI environment is also on Node 22+, your next deploy and CI run will use the same pnpm major version as Dyad. If you run into an error, follow the manual upgrade steps below.

Manual upgrade

To do a manual upgrade, open your Dyad app code directory in your terminal.

node --version

npm install -g pnpm@latest-11

pnpm --version

"packageManager": "[email protected]"

pnpm install

git add package.json pnpm-lock.yaml
git commit -m "Migrate to pnpm 11"

Troubleshooting

My deploy fails before installing dependencies. Check the Node.js version used by your deploy platform or CI workflow. pnpm 11 requires Node 22+, so Node 18, 20, or 21 can fail as soon as Corepack or your package manager starts.

My deploy still fails with a lockfile error. Make sure the migration commit was pushed, and that your deploy platform isn't pinning its own pnpm version (for example, a PNPM_VERSION environment variable on Vercel or a hardcoded version in a GitHub Actions workflow). Any external pin should match the major version in your packageManager field.

pnpm install reports ignored build scripts. That's expected — Dyad only allows dependency build scripts from a curated allow-list. See the warning message for details; your app will work the same way it does inside Dyad.