Volta has been my go-to tool for managing multiple versions of Node.js. While it’s lesser known than say nvm, I’ve found Volta to be generally performant and reliable.

cd my-project
volta pin node@20.19.0 # adds volta.node field to package.json
node --version  # will output v20.19.0

One feature of Volta I’ve relied on is its package manager pinning, which I’d used to ensure a particular version of npm or yarn is used for a project.

However, Volta’s package manager pinning seems to be stagnating in its support for alternative, modern package managers. I discovered this when I was trying to migrate from yarn classic to pnpm, and found that the support for pnpm remains experimental in Volta, despite the feature being introduced a couple of years ago.

Luckily, there’s a Node.js official tool called Corepack that handles pinning a specific version of package manager for a project, which includes first class support for pnpm. While there’s no official way of integrating Volta with Corepack, I’ve found that installing Corepack’s shims in the Volta bin directory seems to do the trick.

volta install corepack
corepack enable --install-directory ~/.volta/bin

With Volta and Corepack setup together, you can pin your project via:

volta pin node@22 # adds volta.node field to package.json
corepack use pnpm@10 # adds packageManager field

For those who are using Volta to pin Node.js versions, and want to delegate the package manager pinning to Corepack for first class pnpm support, I recommend giving this approach a try!