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What is the difference between yarn and npm these days?

Ari Kalfus on June 16, 2020

Back when yarn was first released, the defining feature was yarn's lockfile, which sped up dependency tree resolution and thus the overall install ...

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Jun 16 '20 • Edited

I now prefer NPM, but NPM does sometimes have problem with installing from package-lock.json.

Some other still missing features of NPM include,

resolutions
Workspace, without using Lerna

Luckily, I now know an easy way to npm-not-yarn and yarn-not-npm, with zero dependency.

echo 'engine-strict=true' >> .npmrc

// package.json

{
    "engines": {
      "node": "12.x",
      "npm": "6.x",
      "yarn": "please-use-npm"
    }
}

It is a best idea to pin dependencies and engines visibly for open source contributors, anyway.

Neeraj Lagwankar • Jun 16 '20

From my own personal experience, I'm going to start using yarn.
I started using yarn due to ReactNative and was blown away by the install speeds. It was easily 2-3 times faster than npm. I haven't tested it for other than React or ReactNative but I think I'll definitely be using it a lot more in the near future.

Justo • Jun 17 '20

Hi Neerja. I can tell yarn is faster. Recently I used npm for a fresh React Native project and... slower.

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Jun 16 '20

Yarn is still faster that's all I can say.

Shine Santhosh • Jun 16 '20 • Edited

try
yarn add express
and
npm i express
You can see the difference by yourself. Yes, I love it because it's faster but also it's easier to run scripts with yarn. You don't have to
npm run dev
just
yarn dev

I'm lazy; I hate to type another 3 letter word😅

But having different lockfiles can put you in a lot of dependency issues.
So if I clone a project I'll look for the lockfile. And will use yarn and npm depending upon it.

So the thing is, yarn can install stuff faster.

Ari Kalfus • Jun 16 '20

Maybe time for me to go back to yarn, then!

Rubin • Jun 17 '20 • Edited

I love yarn because it does parallel downloads making its 2-3 times faster than npm. Also you can run scripts easily with yarn script-name . I know the second one is not a huge thing but who wouldn't want to save some hundred keystrokes per day

Mahmoud ElNaggar • Jun 17 '20 • Edited

Yarn is faster
Logs are cleaner for me (most of the time if something went wrong I know what happened right away, I don't need to squint my eyes and go through all the lines to inspect which line exactly is relevant to what I need to do)

Pavel Denisjuk • Jun 18 '20

For us at Webiny, NPM is a no-go because it doesn't support workspaces.

You could say "use Lerna". Yes, we do use Lerna, but its hoisting capabilities and speed is far behind Yarn. We have 70+ packages in our monorepo, and Lerna just can't handle that with all the hoisting going on. And the results of hoisting between Yarn and Lerna are completely different.

For those who care to go into a deep analysis, there is a great article which compares npm, yarn, lerna and all the combinations of those, with benchmarks, etc.: doppelmutzi.github.io/monorepo-ler...

Kirill Shestakov • Jun 16 '20

I'm really liking yarn pnp. The idea that you don't have to do npm install or think at all about node_modules is awesome. Another great thing is that all your dependencies, as well as yarn itself, are stored inside your repo. I like the direction that yarn takes you into. It takes you away from reliance on npm, and allows you to be self-sufficient.

Ari Kalfus • Jun 17 '20

pnp is new to me... will have to see how it works. It looks like its resolution gets funky with typescript.

Kirill Shestakov • Jun 17 '20

I've been using TypeScript without much problem. If you're referring to TS in VSCode, you can use a custom workspace TS version (and pnpfy it) for the imports to get resolved properly.

Sebastijan Grabar • Jun 17 '20

It's a My dad is stronger than your dad discussion.

I pick Yarn, because it installs dependencies faster and I can use the yarn command-line tool to execute both dependencies and npm scripts. I frequently mess up npm/npx/npm run

Shine Santhosh • Jun 18 '20

That's a good comparison😂

Daniel McMahon • Jun 17 '20

I recently bricked the npm setup on my windows machine, immediately installed yarn and just continued coding. Being versatile enough to use both is fantastic!

I have found yarn to generally be faster in personal projects but haven't done the proper benchmarking to confirm!

Alain D'Ettorre • Jun 16 '20

"NPM is by far the most popular so why switch to yarn" is what 90% people would say in my opinion

Ari Kalfus • Jun 16 '20

That's kind of why I posed this question. I used yarn initially for the lockfile and moved back to npm when it added a lockfile. Want to understand why people still use yarn.

spiritupbro • Jun 20 '20

how bout pnpm tho?

Adam Crockett 🌀 • Jun 17 '20

I am going to add something, I prefer cdns because esmodules but I also prefer pika cdn