🩹 Migrate from patch-package to pnpm patch

tl;dr A few simple steps to migrate your existing patch-package patches to pnpm patch.

If you moved your project to pnpm, you probably still have a patches/ folder full of patch-package patches. pnpm has its own patching mechanism built in, so there is no need to keep patch-package around as an extra dependency.

The catch is that the two tools use a slightly different patch format. The diff content is the same, only the paths inside the patch point to a different location. So migrating is mostly a find & replace.

This came up in pnpm#10087 where a conversion command was requested. Until that lands, here is how to do it by hand.

💡 You can even batch these commands for multiple patches at once. For each step duplicate the command for each package, it should work. I migrated 5 patches in 1 minute.

1. Create a pnpm temporary patch folder

pnpm patch <package-name>

This prints a temporary folder where pnpm extracts the package so you can edit it.

2. Open the existing patch

patches/<package-name>+<version>.patch

3. Replace all occurrences of the path

Replace every occurrence of

node_modules/<package-name>

with the new folder created by pnpm

node_modules/.pnpm_patches/<package-name>@<version>

This is the only real difference between the two formats, the paths.

4. Apply the patch with git apply

git apply patches/<package-name>+<version>.patch

Now the temporary folder contains your changes, just as if you had edited them by hand.

5. Commit the patch with pnpm

pnpm patch-commit /Users/me/my-project/node_modules/.pnpm_patches/<package-name>@<version>

pnpm now generates its own patch and wires it up in pnpm-workspace.yaml (or package.json) under patchedDependencies.

📝 pnpm patches are created as patches/<package-name>.patch (without the version in the file name)

6. Remove the old patch-package patch

rm patches/<package-name>+<version>.patch

And that’s it! Repeat for every patch, and once the folder is clean you can also remove patch-package and its postinstall script from your package.json.

Thanks for reading my blog posts! 🎉