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NPM (Node Package Manager) and Yarn are both JavaScript based package managers for ease of installing 3rd Party Tools & Libraries into your modern web development workflow. They revolutionized the way people shared code. Instead of having to tediously copy and paste, or even worse, link to a hosted version of the library, now you fetch a library or module and store it locally in your project. Yarn and NPM work fairly similarly, but have a few key differences in how they operate.
yarn add
while NPM uses npm install
(Can be confusing when switching between the two.)package.json
file to get the packages to install. However, Yarn uses yarn.lock
and NPM uses package-lock.json
to more explicitly state which package version to get.NPM was originally released back in January 2010 by Isaac Z. Schlueter and took the JavaScript world by storm. It was the inspiration for Yarn, developed by Facebook in 2016, PHP's package manager Composer, and more. Due to the popularity of the project they eventually incorporated as npm, inc in order to manage enterprise level relationships to ensure the success of the project and the JavaScript community as a whole.
Every time you install a new package with Yarn, it stores a copy of it locally on your computer. This way when multiple projects require the same package, Yarn doesn't have to go download the required package again, it just grabs it off your hard drive and puts it in the project you're installing, saving you time and bandwidth.
According to a test done by GitHub user appleboy that you can reproduce yourself, Yarn both with and without it's cache is significantly faster at installing modules, and even installs without internet! (assuming you've cached the package you're installing).
Here are the results of their test comparing NPM to Yarn:
Test | npm install | npm ci | yarn |
---|---|---|---|
install without cache (without node_modules) | 3m | 3m | 1m |
install with cache (without node_modules) | 1m | 18s | 30s |
install with cache (with node_modules) | 54s | 21s | 2s |
install without internet (with node_modules) | - | - | 2s |
Blazing Fast! Even without using a cache, Yarn is 200% faster than NPM.
After doing the research for this post I'm definitely sticking to Yarn for projects moving forward. Here's how you can install Yarn and see for yourself just how fast it is and get started integrating it into your workflow.
Go to the Yarn Installation Page, make your you have Node.js installed, download the version you want and run the installer. Yarn goes through and installs for you.
You can install Yarn with HomeBrew:
brew install yarn
Go to the Yarn Installation Page and follow the steps. You'll have to add Yarn's repo to APT and then install through there.
You can even install Yarn with NPM:
npm install --global yarn
Although, for security reasons that I don't fully understand they recommend NOT installing Yarn through NPM and instead installing Yarn based on your specific operating system (Ubuntu/Debian, Mac, Windows).
Let me know on twitter @JackHarner if you do and which package manager you prefer! Thanks for reading!!
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