Yarn is one of the main JavaScript package managers,[3][4] developed in 2016 by Sebastian McKenzie of Meta (formerly Facebook) for the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment. An alternative to the npm package manager, Yarn was created as a collaboration of Facebook (now Meta), Exponent (now Expo.dev), Google, and Tilde (the company behind Ember.js) to solve consistency, security, and performance problems with large codebases.[5]
 | |
| Developer(s) | Various |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 18 June 2016; 8 years ago (2016-06-18)[1] |
| Stable release |
4.3.1[2] |
| Repository | |
| Written in | TypeScript, JavaScript |
| Platform | Cross-platform |
| Type | Package manager |
| License | BSD 2-Clause License |
| Website | yarnpkg |
Users can write their own plugins for Yarn.
Yarn constraints allow users to enforce rules for their dependencies or manifest fields across scoped workspaces.
Downloaded packages are cached and stored as a single file.
Plug'n'Play allows users to run Node projects without node_modules folder, defining the way or location to resolve dependencies package files with the Plug-n-Play-control file. This feature is aimed to fix an unwell structured node_modules architecture and resulting in a faster Node.js application start-up time.
Plugins can add new resolvers, fetchers, linkers, commands, and can also register to some events or be integrated with each other, most features of Yarn are implemented through plugins, including yarn add and yarn install, which are also preinstalled plugins.
Users can define which protocol will be used to resolve certain packages, for example, the git protocol is used for downloading a public package from a Git repository, and the patch protocol is used for creating a patched copy of the original package.
Release Workflow automatically upgrades relative packages among monorepos workspaces when root packages are upgraded.
Workspaces allow multiple projects to work together in the same repository and automatically apply changes to other relatives when source code is modified, allowing installation of multiple packages in a single pass by running the installation command only once.
Zero-Installs solve the needs of installation of packages when packages is required to install when the codes is just fresh fetched to local.
To install yarn:
npm install -g yarn
To install a package with yarn:[8]
yarn add package-name
To install a package with yarn for development and testing purposes:
yarn add package-name --dev
NB: in the first versions, it was:
yarn install package-name --save-dev