Facebook's New Javascript Package manager "Yarn"

Facebook's New Javascript Package manager "Yarn"

Today Facebook announced a new package manager called Yarn, here are a few quotes which help explain, yet another Javascript Package manager

From Facebook: Why did they build Yarn?

Yarn is a new package manager that replaces the existing workflow for the npm client or other package managers while remaining compatible with the npm registry. It has the same feature set as existing workflows while operating faster, more securely, and more reliably.

— Sebastian McKenzie, Yarn: A new package manager for JavaScript

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Initially, following the prescribed best practices, we only checked in package.json and asked engineers to manually run npm install. This worked well enough for engineers, but broke down in our continuous integration environments, which need to be sandboxed and cut off from the internet for security and reliability reasons.

— Sebastian McKenzie, Yarn: A new package manager for JavaScript

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By breaking these steps down cleanly and having deterministic results, Yarn is able to parallelize operations, which maximizes resource utilization and makes the install process faster. On some Facebook projects, Yarn reduced the install process by an order of magnitude, from several minutes to just seconds. Yarn also uses a mutex to ensure that multiple running CLI instances don't collide and pollute each other.

— Sebastian McKenzie, Yarn: A new package manager for JavaScript

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So yarn is in Beta right? Nope

At Facebook we're already using Yarn in production, and it's been working really well for us. It powers the dependency and package management for many of our JavaScript projects. With each migration we've enabled engineers to build offline and helped speed up their workflow.

— Sebastian McKenzie, Yarn: A new package manager for JavaScript

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From NPM

Yarn also shows that one of the world’s largest tech companies, which is already behind hugely popular JavaScript projects like React, is invested in and committed to the ongoing health of the npm community. That’s great news for JavaScript devs everywhere.

— Isaac Z. Schlueter, Hello, Yarn!

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It does not authenticate to the registry the way the official client does, so it’s currently unable to work with private packages. The Yarn team is aware of this issue and have said they’ll address it.

— Isaac Z. Schlueter, Hello, Yarn!

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Other Notable Thoughts about Yarn

This also highlights a shrewd move on the part of npm: a clear decoupling between the npm registry and client, with a well-defined protocol between the two. The strength of Node is in the staggering size of its ecosystem; how those bits end up on disk is an implementation detail. This smart separation allows for this kind of experimentation on the client side, without causing the ecosystem fragmentation that happens when a new package manager requires a new registry.

— Tom Dale, Hacker News Comment

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The team working on Yarn reached out to the major frameworks and made sure that Yarn would be a good fit for projects written using them.

— Yehuda Katz, Why I'm Working on Yarn

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Time to install React Native's dependencies on a MacBook Pro (Mid 2015) in different scenarios.

— Yarn Package, Yarn

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Wow. Yarn. First install, 30 seconds, 2nd fresh install, 13s (compared to npm a few minutes). Interesting.

— Rem, via twitter.com

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npm is great and I'm glad it exists, but I'm also glad that someone is addressing its problems.

— Jergason, via twitter.com

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