vp treats a nested project as part of the parent's pnpm workspace, ignoring its own packageManager and lockfile #3013

Describe the bug

In a repo whose root is a pnpm project with a settings-only pnpm-workspace.yaml (no packages, used for overrides / allowBuilds), vp treats every nested project as part of that workspace, even when the nested folder isn't listed under packages and has its own packageManager pin and lockfile.

Inside the nested npm project svc/:

• vpr hello runs the root's hello script instead of svc's.
• vp install --frozen-lockfile runs pnpm, which refuses with This project is configured to use npm. Without a packageManager field in svc/ it fails with Headless installation requires a pnpm-lock.yaml file instead.
• vp env current inside svc/ reports pnpm 12.11.2 with source packageManager, the root's pin, not svc's npm@11.17.0.

I expected vp to treat svc/ as its own npm project, as it does when the root has no pnpm-workspace.yaml. pnpm 11+ only reads settings like overrides from pnpm-workspace.yaml, so a pnpm root can't avoid having one.

We hit this when switching a repo root to pnpm: about 20 Cloud Run services below it stay on npm or bun, and vp stopped working in all of them.

Workaround: a comment-only pnpm-workspace.yaml plus the packageManager pin in each nested project makes vp treat it as its own project again.

Reproduction

https://github.com/Goobles/vp-nested-workspace-repro

Steps to reproduce

git clone https://github.com/Goobles/vp-nested-workspace-repro
cd vp-nested-workspace-repro
./repro.sh

repro.sh runs vpr hello and vp install --frozen-lockfile in svc/, first with the root pnpm-workspace.yaml (bug), then with it moved away (expected behaviour).

System Info

# vp env current (run inside svc/)
Node.js:
  Version    24.19.0
  Source     default
  Bin Path   /home/agent/.vite-plus/js_runtime/node/24.19.0/bin/node
  Installed  true
  Mode       managed

Package Manager:
  Name       pnpm
  Version    12.11.2
  Source     packageManager
  Bin Paths
    pnpm     /home/agent/.vite-plus/package_manager/pnpm/12.11.2/pnpm/bin/pnpm
    pnpx     /home/agent/.vite-plus/package_manager/pnpm/12.11.2/pnpm/bin/pnpx
  Installed  true
  Mode       system_first

# vp --version
vp v1.1.0

# Linux x86_64

Used Package Manager

npm (nested project), pnpm (repo root)

Logs

### 1. Parent has pnpm-workspace.yaml (bug)
$ vpr hello
$ echo hello from ROOT ⊘ cache disabled
hello from ROOT

$ vp install --frozen-lockfile
  × This project is configured to use npm
  help: Run a one-off command with "pnpm dlx npm <command>", or link a npm
        command that follows this project's pin with "pnpm shim add npm".

### 2. Parent pnpm-workspace.yaml removed (expected behaviour)
$ vpr hello
$ echo hello from SVC ⊘ cache disabled
hello from SVC

$ vp install --frozen-lockfile
added 1 package, and audited 2 packages in 390ms
found 0 vulnerabilities

Validations

• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Check that there isn't already an issue for the same bug.
• Confirm this is a Vite+ issue and not an upstream issue (Vite, Vitest, tsdown, Rolldown, or Oxc).
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example.

Written by claude-opus-5-5 via Claude Code in T3 Code on goobles-agentbox.