Configuring minimum release age across npm, pnpm, and yarn

Setting a minimum release age (cooldown) on dependencies is a low-effort, high-impact defense against supply-chain attacks, as most malicious packages are detected and removed within hours. All three major Node.js package managers (npm, pnpm, and yarn) support this feature, but each uses different configuration names and units—npm uses days, while pnpm and yarn use minutes. The article provides specific configuration instructions for each tool, noting known bugs and the importance of also setting cooldown periods independently in Renovate or Dependabot to avoid PRs that cannot be installed.

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: ini 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 bash 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 : yaml minimumReleaseAge: 1440 Optional, if you have internal packages you want to bypass the gate: yaml minimumReleaseAge: 1440 minimumReleaseAgeExclude: - '@platformatic/ ' If you're still on pnpm 10.x, the .npmrc form is: ini 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 bash 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 : yaml npmMinimalAgeGate: 1440 If you have packages that must bypass the gate: yaml 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 bash 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.