Configuring minimum release age across npm, pnpm, and yarn

guide.md

Configuring minimum release age across npm, pnpm, and yarn

Setting a minimum release age (a "cooldown") on dependencies is a cheap, high-leverage defense against supply-chain attacks. Most malicious package versions are detected and yanked within hours, so a 24-hour delay filters out the smash-and-grab incidents (axios 1.14.1, ua-parser-js, Solana web3.js, etc.).

All three major Node.js package managers now support this, but each one used a different name and a different unit. Here is what you need.

Minimum versions

Tool	Setting	Unit	Introduced in
npm	min-release-age	days	npm CLI 11.10.0 (Feb 2026)
pnpm	minimumReleaseAge	minutes	pnpm 10.16 (Sep 2025); default 1440 since pnpm 11.0
Yarn	npmMinimalAgeGate	minutes (numeric)	Yarn Berry 4.10.0

A note on Yarn: the docs advertise duration strings like "7d", but there's a known parsing bug (yarnpkg/berry#6991) where day suffixes were silently ignored. Until that's resolved everywhere, pass minutes as a number. 1 day = 1440.

npm — per-project

Add to .npmrc in the project root:

min-release-age=1

The value is in days. Do not combine with --before in the same invocation — npm errors out if both are present.

npm — locally (user-wide)

npm config set min-release-age 1 --location=user

This writes to ~/.npmrc. Use --location=global if you want it in the global npm config instead.

pnpm — per-project

Put it in pnpm-workspace.yaml (this is the canonical place since pnpm 11; in earlier versions .npmrc also works):

minimumReleaseAge: 1440

Optional, if you have internal packages you want to bypass the gate:

minimumReleaseAge: 1440
minimumReleaseAgeExclude:
  - '@platformatic/*'

If you're still on pnpm 10.x, the .npmrc form is:

minimum-release-age=1440

Heads-up: on pnpm 10.x there's a known bug where minimumReleaseAge is silently ignored if any package in the workspace has shared-workspace-lockfile=false in its .npmrc (pnpm/pnpm#10008). Worth checking.

pnpm — locally (user-wide)

pnpm config set minimumReleaseAge 1440 --location=user

On pnpm 11+, non-auth settings like this go into ~/.config/pnpm/config.yaml rather than ~/.npmrc.

Yarn (Berry 4.10+) — per-project

In .yarnrc.yml:

npmMinimalAgeGate: 1440

If you have packages that must bypass the gate:

npmMinimalAgeGate: 1440
npmPreapprovedPackages:
  - "@platformatic/*"

npmPreapprovedPackages accepts both glob patterns and exact locators (e.g. @aws-sdk/types@3.877.0), which is more flexible than pnpm's package-name-only exclusions.

Yarn — locally (user-wide)

yarn config set --home npmMinimalAgeGate 1440

--home writes to ~/.yarnrc.yml instead of the project-local file.

A few caveats worth knowing

The cooldown is enforced at install time, not at update-suggestion time. If you're using Renovate or Dependabot, configure their minimumReleaseAge / cooldown independently — otherwise they'll keep opening PRs you can't actually install. Renovate 42's config:best-practices preset already sets a 3-day default for npm; Dependabot's cooldown.default-days is the equivalent.

None of these tools currently let you scope the gate per registry, so internal packages from a private registry get held back along with everything else unless you put them in the exclusion list (npm doesn't have one yet — there's an open issue, #8994).

The defaults will likely shift soon: pnpm 11 already turned this on by default at 1440 minutes, and npm CLI v12 is expected to do the same. Setting it explicitly now means your config keeps working unchanged when defaults move.

You should include bun as well: https://bun.com/docs/runtime/bunfig#install-minimumreleaseage

thanks Matteo!

Forked this and added a section for bun users (https://gist.github.com/tom-ricci/bade55606ebb7a550598f11e29f1d6b0)

Another nice info to add is that npx, bunx do not use those flags, apparently. For bun this is tracked in oven-sh/bun#30748