Contribution

• I'd be willing to implement this feature (contributing guide)

Describe the user story

As a developer, when installing a package into a workspace that uses catalogs, I want pnpm add package@xyz to install the package to catalogs but it's installed to package.json instead. This is not desired when intending to use a catalog only workspace, so manual copy pasting the dependency to catalog follows after installation.

Describe the solution you'd like

A new option to pnpm add like --save-to-catalog where if provided it saves the dependency to the default catalog and updates package.json to use the catalog version. It should also accept an optional name parameter, such that if provided it installs to the named catalog

Describe the drawbacks of your solution

It introduces complexities/questions on the following edge cases

• If the dependency already exists in package.json, it should be updated to point to a catalog version
• It should work with the existing --save-dev, --save-optional, --save-exact , save-peer and --save-prod options as well
• If the dependency already exists in the destination catalog, it should be updated in place to the specified version

Describe alternatives you've considered

While the provided pnpm/catalog codemod can be used, it doesn't work for the usecase of installing a new dependency. The new dependency is, more often than not, only used by one package and wouldn't be detected by the codemod.