🚀 Feature: Use pnpm as a Node.js environment manager

[conrmahr]

Bug Report Checklist

• I have tried restarting my IDE and the issue persists.
• I have pulled the latest main branch of the repository.
• I have searched for related issues and found none that matched my issue.

Overview

Since the project uses pnpn for installing packages, why not streamline it for Node.js environment installs? This will allow you to built-in a check whether the current environment on the machine matches the recommended version. Along with removing the .nvmrc file.

1. Check if recommended version exists:

$ pnpm env list

16.20.2
20.6.0

2. Install and use if not found:

$ pnpm env use 18.17.1

Fetching Node.js 18.17.1 ...
Node.js 18.17.1 is activated

3. Profit 💵

Additional Info

Official docs: https://pnpm.io/cli/env

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

It's an interesting idea, thanks for bringing it up @conrmahr! (for context, we'd briefly chatted about this on a Twitch stream today)

Putting as in discussion - I haven't used pnpm env much. One nice thing about .nvmrc is that if you're using nvm then the .nvmrc should have it auto-set your package for you. Is there an equivalent for pnpm?

[conrmahr]

Good question. It looks like it can use the .npmrc file per-project configuration file with the parameter use-node-version=x.x.x.

📖 https://pnpm.io/npmrc#nodejs-settings

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Coming back to this, I still would really like to get rid of the .nvmrc file. It's irksome to me that we have both the npm-standard package.json "engines" field and some ad hoc script tool config file. My main motivation here is to reduce the number of config files.

I think generally getting rid of .nvmrc is could go with either of:

• Use package.json engines version? nvm-sh/nvm#651: the nvmrc route
• Contributing support for reading nodejs version from package.json pnpm/pnpm#7211: the pnpm route

Either way, blocked for now. 😖