What is yarn?
Yarn is a fast, reliable, and secure dependency management tool that is used to manage project dependencies in JavaScript and Node.js environments. It caches every package it downloads, so it never needs to download the same package again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization, and it uses checksums to verify the integrity of every installed package before its code is executed.
What are yarn's main functionalities?
Adding a dependency
This command adds the lodash package to the project's dependencies.
yarn add lodash
Upgrading a dependency
This command upgrades the react package to its latest version according to the version range specified in the package.json file.
yarn upgrade react
Removing a dependency
This command removes the moment package from the project's dependencies.
yarn remove moment
Installing all dependencies
This command installs all the dependencies listed in the project's package.json file.
yarn install
Locking down dependency versions
This command installs dependencies based on the yarn.lock file without generating a new lock file, ensuring reproducibility across installations.
yarn install --frozen-lockfile
Other packages similar to yarn
npm
npm is the default package manager for Node.js and is bundled with it. It serves a similar purpose to Yarn, allowing users to install, share, and manage dependencies in their projects. Compared to Yarn, npm has a different CLI syntax and handles package installations and lock files differently. npm has improved its performance in recent versions, but Yarn is often cited for its faster and more reliable installations due to its caching and parallelization features.
pnpm
pnpm is another alternative to Yarn that focuses on performance and disk space efficiency. It uses a content-addressable filesystem to store packages, which means that a package version is saved only once on a disk and then hard-linked into the node_modules directories of projects that use it. This results in faster installations and less disk space usage. pnpm also has a strictness that prevents implicit dependencies, which can lead to more predictable and secure projects.