How to update across all projects & remove older versions?

[LJNeon]

My goal is simple, update pnpm for the user and/or across all projects and remove unnecessary older versions. I have tried pnpm self-update but it seems to only work for the current project, an older version is still used elsewhere:

$ cd ~/path/to/project
$ pnpm self-update
Nothing to stop. No server is running for the store at /home/user/.local/share/pnpm/store/v10
The current project is already set to use pnpm v10.30.3
$ pnpm --version
10.30.3
$ cd ~
$ pnpm --version
10.28.2

I also tried running the initial install command in my home folder:

$ cd ~
$ curl -fsSL https://get.pnpm.io/install.sh | sh -
==> Downloading pnpm binaries 10.30.3
 WARN  using --force I sure hope you know what you are doing
Copying pnpm CLI from /tmp/tmp.iCBj7kcgO4/pnpm to /home/user/.local/share/pnpm/.tools/pnpm-exe/10.30.3/pnpm
No changes to the environment were made. Everything is already up to date.
$ pnpm --version
10.30.3

Which did update the pnpm version used contrary to the response message. However it didn't remove the old version, and I'm unsure if this is the best way to go about it:

$ ls ~/.local/share/pnpm/.tools/pnpm-exe/
10.28.2  10.30.3

Here's a more realistic example of why I would want to clean up older unused versions:

$ cd ~/.local/share/pnpm/.tools/\@pnpm+linux-x64/
10.10.0/ 10.12.4/ 10.15.0/ 10.22.0/ 10.28.2/ 10.30.2/ 9.12.1/  
10.11.0/ 10.13.1/ 10.18.2/ 10.28.0/ 10.29.3/ 10.30.3/ 
10.12.1/ 10.14.0/ 10.2.1/  10.28.1/ 10.30.1/ 10.8.0/

So what is the best/intended way to go about this?

[aniruddhaadak80]

@LJNeon The standalone script installs separate binaries into ~/.local/share/pnpm/.tools/, effectively caching every version you''ve ever used (similar to nvm).

To clean them up:
Yes, it is safe to manually delete the folders in ~/.local/share/pnpm/.tools/ that you are not using. pnpm doesn''t currently have a built-in pnpm clean --versions command for this standalone binary cache.

If you want to automate it, a simple one-liner (carefully) removing all folders except the current version from that directory is the standard maintenance approach.
The "user update" via pnpm self-update installs the new one but deliberately keeps old ones in case specific projects pin them via packageManager field or corepack.

[Omrigotlieb]

Your result matches the docs.

In a project with managePackageManagerVersions=true and a packageManager field, pnpm self-update only updates the version recorded in package.json. It does not replace the globally active pnpm binary.

Outside that kind of project, pnpm self-update installs/links the resolved version into PNPM_HOME, which is what pnpm setup adds to your PATH.

So if you see a newer version inside the project but an older one in ~, my guess is that your shell is still finding another pnpm installation earlier in PATH. I’d run pnpm self-update outside the managed project, then check which pnpm binary your shell is actually using and remove/update the older install.