Sometimes, all you want to do is grab an npm package and execute a command with it, without having to install it (whether globally or as a dependency).
That's what you can do with pnpm dlx
.
An example
pnpm dlx vercel deploy
This example shows how to use the vercel CLI package without having to install it thanks to pnpm dlx
.
In this example, pnpm downloads the vercel package, and executes it with the command deploy
(that deploys a project to the Vercel platform).
Some use cases
You don't want to install globally a package because you only need to execute its binary script once
You don't want a package to be a dev dependency of your project, or you are not using it in the context of a Node project
You need to execute a CLI package command from a CI pipeline
You want to ensure you use the latest version of a package (useful for starter kits like
create-vite
, orcreate-vue
)
Good to know
For starter kits, you can use pnpm create
instead of pnpm dlx
. For instance, executing pnpm create vue
is equivalent to executing pnpm dlx create-vue
.
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