Are you a YARNer or a NPMer?

An age old debate about package managers

Each have their pros & their cons

I personally prefer Yarn - I think it's general installation of packages is quicker and I REALLY appreciate its peer dependency resolution it saves LOADS of time.

So - what is your go-to package manager and why?

Comments

[gkTim]

pnpm really fast installation ( in one monorepo I have 2,5 min vs 20 min in npm) and stricter in resolving dependencies. Also saves a lot of disk space if you have multiple projects.

[Randell Knight]

I also use and enjoy pnpm. It's great for strictly resolving dependencies across the board, instead of recreating the wheel.

[Andrew Baisden]

Is it really that good would you ever go back to npm or yarn? Or do you still use them sometimes?

[gkTim]

If I can choose I always choose pnpm. But try them all and decided for your self :)

[Muhammad Uzair]

NPM, haven't tried yarn yet, I can wait few minutes while installing dependencies so don't think speed is that much of issue in NPM

[Jacob Enders]

NPM, because it has more community support. I'd rather have more compatibility between my tools rather than save 10 minutes on an installation I only do a few times a year.

[Casiel Didriksson Muriedas]

I've been using yarn berry (v 3.2.1) and it's awesome!
Always been a fan of yarn, it's really useful to just write yarn command instead of nom run command

[Fevzi Yıldızhan]

ı usually use yarn

[Serghei Mitroshin]

npm for the moment, because of npx.
yarn dlx at the moment works bad.

P.S. I tried to work on nx.js monorepo framework, and it doesn't support yarn v3.
I was surprised that some libraries/tech-stacks must something to do for supporting yarn dlx or other yarn v3 features.

And npm working from the box with all libraries without any issues :)

[Chad Adams]

Last time I used Yarn berry (Which was a couple weeks ago) I couldn't get it to install private packages from GitHub packages because it doesn't use your .npmrc like PNPM or NPM. Unfortunately for my case it wasn't a drop in replacement for NPM. So I use NPM for now. I like the interactive upgrade feature of Yarn and the node_module structure that PNPM has.

[Adam Crockett 🌀]

I usually resolve the dependencies manually and download zips myself 🤣

[Dillon Barnes]

Oh dear. I feel sorry for you. That must be a nightmare!

[Adam Crockett 🌀]

I have a dial up connection which makes it even worse!

[Tyler Mills]

Neat, sounds very manual :p

I can think of using this for c++ or so, but im curious.

[Adam Crockett 🌀]

It's only a joke, this is what they both do.
CPP has some package managers already I think, Conan or something, but there is no standard "package" last time I was working in CPP anyway

[Tyler Mills]

I see :p

and good to know as well, I do plan to start looking into vsti development (synths and such for DAWs) which mainly uses c++

[Mateusz Kwiatkowski]

A true old school hardcore developer! 😂

[Adam Crockett 🌀]

I joke but I can remember doing this! So many zip files, I can remember also when .min.js was a new choice!

[Mateusz Kwiatkowski]

Adam, I know and I can definitely relate, which makes it even funnier 😆.

[Adam Crockett 🌀]

I hope people don't feel bad for us being old 😂

[Nik F P]

PNPM all the way, unless for some reason I have to use something else for some reason.

• Install a dependency another project is already using on the same machine > FAST
• Clear node_modules and reinstall > VERY fast vs others
• Raw install in a CI worflow or fresh OS distro > usually faster than Yarn, always faster than NPM in my experience
• Workspaces just kinda works. I fought with workspaces in NPM and had all manner of issues with they way things were hoisted, dependency versioning issues, and even VS Code not recognizing imports from dependency packages I was writing in the same Monorepo. All gone with PNPM
• MASSIVE savings in disk space, since each dependency version is stored in a global cache once, and then linked in to each project. This is also why things install faster, if a dependency has been installed on the OS before, nothing gets pulled over the network.

Right now, PNPM is my only globally installed dependency. Everything else can be explicitly listed in each project without having to be reinstalled for each project, which has saved me from some CI headaches I ran into with NPM previously. (Like forgetting to list typescript, and having it work locally because of a global install but NOT work on CI because there are no global installs)

I know I sound like a fanboi, but its my happy place.

[Kerrick Chan]

I heard NextJS has dependence graph problem.🤔 it good and fast but not fully support some old project🥲

[Richard Guay]

npm is the one I use. I just never got around to trying out yarn or pnpm, but I’ve used yarn once to compile a repo that was based on it. But, I use mask to run the tasks in npm and external moving things around or setting up the compile with other command line commands.