Allow removing/configuring the inputs of pnpmInstall tasks

[boris-petrov]

pnpm is pretty fast. Running pnpm install generally takes a second or two when all is up-to-date even when there are many things in package.json.

On the other hand, Gradle's caches of the pnpmInstall task can take quite a while to compute if the task needs rerunning. I would like to remove that and set these tasks to always execute - i.e. depend on pnpm itself to be clever and not do anything rather than Gradle (which walks the whole node_modules to check for changes).

I definitely think this will improve the performance of my build. What do you think?

[deepy]

Absolutely agree, in hindsight we never should have had node_modules as an output.
If doNotTrackState had been available in Gradle when I started we likely never would've added it to outputs, but now it's there and breaking backwards compatibility pains me greatly

Good news though, there exists right now a property nodeModulesOutputFilter which lets you filter what's actually cached from node_modules

There's also this logic that's currently only implemented for npm but which I assume pnpm has something similar to

gradle-node-plugin/src/main/kotlin/com/github/gradle/node/NodeExtension.kt

Lines 112 to 125 in 1ea8bf8

	/**
	* Use fast NpmInstall logic, excluding node_modules for output tracking resulting in a significantly faster
	* npm install/ci configuration at the cost of slightly decreased correctness in certain circumstances.
	*
	* In practice this means that if you change node_modules through other means than npm install/ci
	* NpmInstall tasks will continue being up-to-date, but if you're modifying node_modules through
	* other tools you may have other correctness problems and surfacing them here may be preferred.
	*
	* https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/configuring-npm/package-lock-json#hidden-lockfiles
	*
	* Requires npm 7 or later
	* This will become the default in 4.x
	*/
	val fastNpmInstall = project.objects.property<Boolean>().convention(false)

With all the power of hindsight and user feedback, I believe that is the best possible solution for the general case

[boris-petrov]

Why does a breaking change bother you? Just release a new major version and call it a day. 😄 That's what major versions are for. Software has to move forward.

So I could use this nodeModulesOutputFilter today for my pnpm tasks?

[deepy]

Yup, you can also use doNotTrackState to leave it entirely up to pnpm

As for the change, that's already happening, in likely the next major I'll flip the switch and make it the default
Ideally there'd be something similar in yarn and pnpm at that point, but I haven't had the time to investigate them (and the current yarn support is lackluster)