Prisma Generate appears to be Incompatible with PNPM

Bug description

For any project using pnpm (in my experience), prisma initializes however when running prisma generate, it behaves very bizarrely, it first audits all packages in the entire dependency tree (which takes quite a while, though I’m assuming this is the standard pnpm audit and ultimately fails. Of course, after deleting node_modules and running npm i and then npx prisma generate works fine. A complete log after running pnpx prisma generate is below:

⨯ david@DAVID-LAPTOP  ~\Documents\Dev\prisma-bugtesting 
❯ pnpx prisma generate
Environment variables loaded from .env
Prisma schema loaded from prisma\schema.prisma

up to date, audited 11 packages in 2m

26 packages are looking for funding
  run `npm fund` for details

found 0 vulnerabilities
npm WARN deprecated urix@0.1.0: Please see https://github.com/lydell/urix#deprecated
npm WARN deprecated resolve-url@0.2.1: https://github.com/lydell/resolve-url#deprecated
npm WARN deprecated chokidar@2.1.8: Chokidar 2 will break on node v14+. Upgrade to chokidar 3 with 15x less dependencies.
npm WARN deprecated querystring@0.2.0: The
npm WARN deprecated uuid@3.4.0: Please upgrade  to version 7 or higher.  Older versions may use Math.random() in certain circumstances, which is known to be problematic.  See https://v8.dev/blog/math-random for details.
npm WARN deprecated uuid@3.4.0: Please upgrade  to version 7 or higher.  Older versions may use Math.random() in certain circumstances, which is known to be problematic.  See https://v8.dev/blog/math-random for details.
npm WARN deprecated istanbul@0.4.5: This module is no longer maintained, try this instead:
npm WARN deprecated   npm i nyc
npm WARN deprecated Visit https://istanbul.js.org/integrations for other alternatives.
npm WARN tar TAR_ENTRY_ERROR EPERM: operation not permitted, unlink 'C:\Users\david\Documents\Dev\prisma-bugtesting\node_modules\ntypescript\bin\lib.scripthost.d.ts.DELETE.0dce1c2244b7f40b86ed4413f9126831'

added 1793 packages, changed 1 package, and audited 1800 packages in 4m

141 packages are looking for funding
  run `npm fund` for details

10 vulnerabilities (4 low, 6 moderate)

To address issues that do not require attention, run:
  npm audit fix

To address all issues possible (including breaking changes), run:
  npm audit fix --force

Some issues need review, and may require choosing
a different dependency.

Run `npm audit` for details.
Error: Could not resolve @prisma/client despite the installation that we just tried.
Please try to install it by hand with npm install @prisma/client and rerun prisma generate 🙏.

How to reproduce

Follow the start from scratch guide exactly, and prior to the migration step, just run prisma generate (who wants to migrate a test DB anyways?).

Essentially though, in package.json:

  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/node": "^16.0.1",
    "prisma": "^2.26.0",
    "ts-node": "^10.0.0",
    "typescript": "^4.3.5"
  }

and tsconfig.json:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "sourceMap": true,
    "outDir": "dist",
    "strict": true,
    "lib": ["esnext"],
    "esModuleInterop": true
  }
}

with the above schema file. That’s all I kept in this test project. Make sure pnpm is used.

Expected behavior

This should in theory work identically to how it does with npm and yarn, at least if pnpm is “supported” by the Prisma ecosystem. I suspect that for some reason prisma is behaving differently because pnpm uses hard linking to a store OR because prisma doesn’t use the flat node_modules structure that npm/yarn do (see docs). However, I suspect it may be the former issue, since the issue persists even when installing dependencies via pnpm install --shamefully-hoist which recreates the flat structure of npm and yarn.

If PNPM is decidedly not supported (which would be quite unfortunate), then I think that should be documented (and I couldn’t find this anywhere).

Prisma information

datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

generator client {
  provider = "prisma-client-js"
}

model Example {
  id String @id @default(uuid())
  description String
  solution String
}

Environment & setup

• OS: Verified on Windows, but likely in other environments as well.
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Node.js version: 15.3.0
• PNPM version 6.9.1

Prisma Version

prisma               : 2.26.0
@prisma/client       : Not found
Current platform     : windows
Query Engine         : query-engine 9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d (at node_modules\.pnpm\@prisma+engines@2.26.0-23.9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d\node_modules\@prisma\engines\query-engine-windows.exe)
Migration Engine     : migration-engine-cli 9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d (at node_modules\.pnpm\@prisma+engines@2.26.0-23.9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d\node_modules\@prisma\engines\migration-engine-windows.exe)
Introspection Engine : introspection-core 9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d (at node_modules\.pnpm\@prisma+engines@2.26.0-23.9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d\node_modules\@prisma\engines\introspection-engine-windows.exe)
Format Binary        : prisma-fmt 9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d (at node_modules\.pnpm\@prisma+engines@2.26.0-23.9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d\node_modules\@prisma\engines\prisma-fmt-windows.exe)
Default Engines Hash : 9b816b3aa13cc270074f172f30d6eda8a8ce867d
Studio               : 0.408.0

[pantharshit00]

PNPM is definitely supported, we use it ourselves in this repository 😃 : https://github.com/prisma/prisma/blob/master/src/pnpm-workspace.yaml

We just merged a fix for pnpm: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/pull/7942

Can you please try version 2.27.0-dev.54 and see if that works for you? If this is still not resolved, we will have another look here.

[dkantereivin]

Fixed in 2.27.0.