Yarn 4.0

https://yarnpkg.com/blog/release/4.0

by winterqt • 3 years ago

170 139 3 years ago

yarnpkg.com

gavinray3• 3 years ago

After the Yarn 2 debacle, I've been using Yarn 1 (as well as most people who use Yarn that I know).

I briefly tried Yarn 3 but it also did some weird things.

Here's to hoping that Yarn 4 "just works" the way Yarn 1 does.

moomoo11• 3 years ago

Same. I was using yarn 1 until a couple years ago. Now I just use npm. What are the downsides? I have no idea. If there are, they must be negligible because the apps work fine, customers are happy, and devs are able to keep building. We must not have any crazy dependencies because I don’t see much performance gains. At most we might link other packages as we develop.

I think if I really went searching for problems I might find something. I also just try to avoid JS these days unless it’s UI, and there I keep things very lean and straightforward.

porridgeraisin• 3 years ago

That's the thing with tools like this. Eventually whoever you one-upped just incorporates your features and now they have the edge again - your new features and their greater experience.

gavinray3• 3 years ago

The sole reason I haven't migrated to NPM to be honest is the lack of a replacement for "yarn run".

I use "yarn run" incredibly frequently, for things like "yarn run nodemon" and "yarn run tsc" or other executable packages that are local dependencies.

apineda• 3 years ago

Same situation. I use npm on most of my newer projects and yarn on one project where I tried to upgrade it to 2 but it was pure disaster.

nu11ptr• 3 years ago

As an outsider to the JS world, can someone give me the quick pros and cons between yarn and npm? Can you switch back and forth in the same project? Is the end result of your package structure the same?

smithcoin3• 3 years ago

They each generate their own lockfiles that contain the dependency graph so they can’t be used together. They have different utilities in the CLI for example- NPM has npm audit, which yarn doesn’t. They’re mostly the same but you have to keep in mind they have different philosophies in how to manage the dependency graph.

acemarke3• 3 years ago

The end result is essentially the same, yes - all directly requested dependencies, and all of their transitive dependencies, are extracted and installed on disk into `./node_modules`.

Yarn came out at a time when NPM was particularly slow and buggy. NPM has caught up some since then, but I _personally_ still like Yarn better. I find the CLI output more useful, and it feels like it installs in a more consistent amount of time.

You should only have one of them in use in a project at time.

PNPM is another alternative package manager that installs the same packages, but tries to use symlinks to a single globally-cached copy of each package to save disk space. (I believe recent versions of Yarn have an equivalent option, but it's not on by default.)

erhaetherth4• 3 years ago

The end result is essentially the same, yes - all directly requested dependencies, and all of their transitive dependencies, are extracted and installed on disk into `./node_modules`.

Well, no. Not if you use Yarn's zero-install or PnP or whatever they call it. It doesn't create node_modules and thus it's not very compatible, and that's the problem everyone is complaining about.

And the lockfiles aren't cross-compatible either.

solardev5• 3 years ago

TLDR: Choose one, stick with it, try not to have multiple node versions per machine/VM if you can help it, and update & test your packages in small frequent increments if you can. Otherwise it gets to be a nightmare real quick.

Yarn 1.x came out because NPM was really slow and buggy back in the day. Yarn was fast and buggy. Then Yarn 2 came out, was even faster and less buggy, but not backward compatible. I've never actually seen it used in the wild, even now (it's just yarn and NPM on all the projects I've worked on).

Bigger differences will come trying to upgrade multiple packages at once, especially across major versions (e.g. 2.x to 3.x). It's going to be hard no matter what, but `yarn upgrade-interactive` makes it a bit simpler, while npm has third party plugins that do similar things. There's also complexities involved if you need to switch the underlying `node` version across projects, since npm and yarn both need different node versions depending on their own version.

Their final outputs are similar (a node_modules folder where all your JS dependencies and sub-dependencies live), but their internal workings are different, and you shouldn't use both together because they will conflict with each other (sometimes).

Generally, switching back and forth isn't hard on smaller projects: just delete the lock files and delete the node_modules folder and reinstall everything from scratch.

But you really don't want to get into the habit of doing that. There's no real benefit (just choose one and stick with it; either is fine these days), and you may introduce hard-to-catch bugs related to one of your thousands of dependencies. Especially on bigger projects, erasing the lockfile means that it will try to use the designated SemVer in your package.json to get the desired version, but that may be different than the actual version that was being used, which is stored in the lockfile as a manual override. I'm not sure why these package managers had two sources of truth, but it's a nightmare.

dboreham• 3 years ago

0. JS world is full of people captivated by shiny things.

1. yarn was a shiny version of npm

2. They did a Python 3 stunt (well...much worse) with yarn 2 so nobody uses it and everyone stuck with 1.x

3. Bugs aren't fixed in 1.x

4. So back to npm, or the next shiny thing.

Edit: no you can't switch back and forth. The tools end up storing internal state in your project repo. I mean, yes you can change, but it'll mean some hassle and possibly re-writing build files.

fullstop• 3 years ago

0. JS world is full of people captivated by shiny things.

I mostly write C code these days, so I decided to checkout node to see what it was all about, and the shiny thing is spot on. A number of things that I looked at were described as "old" by people because they had been replaced by the new hotness a few months back.

addicted2• 3 years ago

yarn 1 was meaningfully better than npm.

And it was so much better that if they hadn’t pulled the python 3 but worse stunt I suspect a significant number of projects would have continued using yarn even after npm had caught up in terms of features and performance.

smithcoin3• 3 years ago

Getting yarn berry to work was a nightmare in my org. Hopefully this release can actually simplify the toolchain.

acemarke3• 3 years ago

I'm curious, what problems did you run into?

My own experience is that Yarn 2/3 have worked great, as long as you stick with the "`node_modules` linker" option rather than the "PnP/Zero Install" option.

smithcoin3• 3 years ago

Getting it to auth properly with GCP artifact repository in GitHub actions was a bit of a pain. Conflicting documentation between Google, Yarn and GitHub didn’t help.

IggleSniggle• 3 years ago

I looked into switching to yarn for the first time earlier this year, since I was having minor multi-platform issues with npm and was pretty sure yarn could fix them. Since the docs seemed to make PnP/Zero Install the "blessed path," I tried to go with that. I quickly became confused at the correct way to configure certain aspects for my org in conjunction with our build pipelines, decided it was way too much unnecessary complexity to teach to my org, and kept our npm setup.

IceDane2• 3 years ago

But isn't that nearly defeating the entire point of the newer versions? They basically tried to go around the entire ecosystem, and having to not use the main feature that drove the development of yarn berry just seems like proof that it was a mistake.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

The new JavaScript powered constraint engine looks amazingly simple & elegant.

We definitely suffer badly trying to make the very simple example shown happen across our projects: how do we make sure everyone is using the same version of React (for example)?

I'd be curious to know how this rules engine is usable outside of Yarn. The post talks about it being used at Datadog, seemingly on their app. But I didn't see or missed info on the package itself & how it might be embedded elsewhere.

Also super notable from this release, turning off zero-install by default. Still such a neat idea. Even though most package managers are reasonably fast now, there's still often multiple hundreds of MB of files copied out of cache, for each project, and the idea of just directly using the cache without copying stuff in feels like a real nice to have, a potential big saver of disk space.

huy-nguyen• 3 years ago

I’ve been using the new yarn (with workspaces and Plug’n’Play) on a reasonably complex JS project for about 2 years and I think it works great. Congrats to the yarn team on this big release.

d357r0y3r• 3 years ago

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of Yarn adoption is still suck on 1.22.x. Migrating to 2+ appears to be untenable for many teams.

I understand that Yarn 2 is essentially a new tool, as there are certain features you simply can't ship while still being compatible with npm, but this hasn't resonated with developers. The initial appeal of Yarn 1 was that you could pretty much drop it into your node project and get much faster install times. `pnpm`, from what I understand, is faster than yarn, while still having that seamless interop w/ npm.

ForkMeOnTinder• 3 years ago

Yeah I followed the same path. I originally switched from npm to Yarn 1 for the speedup, but then Yarn 2 broke enough things that I never managed to upgrade.

pnpm is (at least) as fast as Yarn 1, and they managed to do it with a much better compatibility story (in my experience)

makingstuffs• 3 years ago

100% my experience too. I still find myself using yarn 1 for some new projects which do not support pnpm (strapi for example).

I remember upgrading yarn to yarn 2 and instantly regretting it then reverting.

animuchan• 3 years ago

Fully supporting the anecdata, different projects at my current company use all of the package managers — npm, yarn 1.x, pnpm, bun — except for yarn 2+

In personal projects I heavily gravitate towards bun as a package manager now, it's npm drop-in replacement but faster (and typing `bun run` is just so cute compared to `npm run`).

hardcopy• 3 years ago

I'd love to use Bun for my projects, but it's not integrated into Corepack yet (and therefore you cannot pin the bun version w/ checksum in package.json)

https://github.com/nodejs/corepack/issues/295

willsmith722• 3 years ago

yes bun as a package manager is great. I wouldn't advise anyone to run a production app with its runtime though. "drop-in replacement" for node was a lie with how many bugs and how much unimplemented stuff there is

synergy20• 3 years ago

second this, I have aliased pnpm to my npm for two years, worked well and very speedy, saved lots of space too. I wonder how npm will borrow the new ideas from pnpm and yarn, fast.

kylemh• 3 years ago

fwiw the change specifically in this release (removing a lot of plugins) will make that adoption path a lot smoother.

Weirdly, going from v1 to v4 is a lot easier now than v1 to v2 or v1 to v3.

That being said... It's too little too late. I use `pnpm` now and maybe I'll use `bun` after total Node compatability.

Narretz• 3 years ago

Oh so that's why upgrading from yarn 1 to yarn 4 was so easy. It's using the "normal" install strategy into node_modules though.

spankalee3• 3 years ago

Neither Yarn 1 nor pnpm have seamless interop with npm, but pnpm is more clear about this and you get the benefit of it's linked install strategy (which npm is adding, btw).

People really should get off of Yarn 1. It's not maintained, has a poor package locking system, and bugs will simply never be fixed.

zarzavat• 3 years ago

I feel a bit scammed by yarn because I started using yarn when it came out and developed a muscle memory and appreciation for its CLI, and they just completely left the Yarn 1 users hanging while they have been messing around with the Yarn 2+ experiment. I don’t want to install Yarn 2 because it’s a weird hack, I just want them to go back to focusing on Yarn 1 goddammit.

benced• 3 years ago

Yarn v2 had support for just plain node modules, no PNP stuff but very few no about it even though it’s easy to setup and so much better than v1.

doodlesdev2• 3 years ago

It also has support for a pnpm-style linker which performs better than node-modules but is much less likely to break libraries.

bsimpson• 3 years ago

I stayed away from yarn@2+ for years, but finally switched to 3.2.1 when I started working on a monorepo with nested workspaces.

I've actually been really happy with 3.2.1. It and wireit together make it super easy to work on a project that spans various libraries/repos. PnP was a compatibility nightmare, but node-modules mode works.

Timon3• 3 years ago

While I personally enjoy Yarn 2+ a lot and prefer it for private projects (I'll explain a bit about my setup at the end), for a long time both the docs and the implementation pretty much guaranteed that it would fail:

- many basic things were missing from the docs for a long time, or at least were easier to find in Github issues (e.g. "what should I gitignore")

- defaulting to PnP meant that, without configuration, things wouldn't properly work on many projects based on frameworks/toolkits/editors

- opinionated defaults made things harder than necessary (e.g. why does `yarn init` create a Git repository?)

You either had to accept/work around these issues, or configure everything to work as e.g. npm or yarn 1 did. I did the latter, and am still happy that I bought in - but I can very much understand anyone who didn't.

My preferred setup with Yarn 2+ projects is:

- use the node-modules linker (I tried pnp every couple of months and always ran into some issue, which I sometimes sent PRs for, but there was always something not working)

- gitignore as described for zero-installs[0] (even though I don't use pnp; this has the advantage that you'll have a ZIP copy of every module cached, leading to very fast local/CI installs and resistance against registry issues)

- create .gitattributes file as described at the end of [0] to hide the binary files from diffs

- add the base SDK[1] for WebStorm support (this rarely worked well)

- add the TypeScript plugin

[0] https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/qa#which-files-should-be... [1]: https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/editor-sdks

eyelidlessness• 3 years ago

I’m not stuck on Yarn 1, I’ve chosen to keep using it because it’s the best tool for my usage. I tried Yarn 2 and found it unsuitable, because:

- it patches packages to work with its PnP system

- even if you opt out of PnP

- in ways that are opaque for me as a user

- and in ways that break usage, eg it broke a beta version of TypeScript because the patch it wanted to apply wasn’t available for the beta

I’m sure the PnP feature is brilliant, but I don’t want to use it and I don’t want its behavior to be applied when I don’t use it. So Yarn 2+ is not an option for me. And since Yarn 1 is still supported, and meets my needs well, I continue to use it by choice.

h1fra3• 3 years ago

On top of the really different API, you always get v1 when you install (which I never understood). You need to upgrade manually everywhere with a command line. If I had to bet: most user didn't even bother upgrading because they are not aware of this behavior.

evtothedev• 3 years ago

I am learning this just now from this comment, so I think you are right.

k__3• 3 years ago

I like that Yarn 4 is installed into the project directory.

This way you always have the right version when cloning a random Yarn repo.

orra2• 3 years ago

you always get v1 when you install (which I never understood)

Yeah, they really wanted you to install yarn's source to your repo, which is why they don't let you `npm install` yarn v2 (or higher). That's maybe great for monorepos, but personally I find it ugly.

Thankfully now you can use `corepack`, which is shipped with npm. This way you can specify a version of yarn in packages.json, in the `packageManager` field. That is, without committing yarn's source to your repo.

starlevel003• 3 years ago

As an occasional Yarn user, this is how I learned there is even versions beyond 1.22.

ljm• 3 years ago

In the last few places I worked we dropped Yarn for pnpm. Did the job and now dependabot can understand it too, on github.

Corepack is a nice addition to Node to make it easy to install a package manager but it's also an unwelcome layer of abstraction (why isn't there just one?).

morbicer• 3 years ago

What issues did you have with Dependabot and Yarn? We use it and it checks & updates lock files for both v1 and v2 Yarns

hinkley• 3 years ago

I had just about convinced my team to use 1.X when the 2.0 design finalized. I give up.

madeofpalk2• 3 years ago

I cannot express how painful yarn pnp has been for us. We've been stuck on a relatively pretty old version of Typescript (4.8) because upgrading it with yarn is so difficult. You have to contend with Yarn patching Typescript, and requiring obscure IDE integrations so it all just works. We still can't update, because we can't get Typescript + Yarn PnP + VS Code on macOS to work together. It has been such a massive time sink for us.

I see no reason for anyone to use Yarn. Either use vanilla npm, or use pnpm which doesnt require a mountain of hacks to work.

chatmasta• 3 years ago

Yarn 2 (and 3) has been great for me, but I disabled PnP from the beginning, and only used the node-modules linker.

killcoder• 3 years ago

We've been running TS + PnP + VSCode on MacOS throughout the entire lifetime of Yarn, through versions 1 - 4.

The plugins system has been extremely valuable to us, and the hoisting / peer dependency behavior has been consistently correct, where other package managers have caused bugs.

aerhardt• 3 years ago

Switched over to yarn a while back. I’ve been developing some front-ends without even knowing yarn 2 was out there… The other day I started a new Next.js project and reached for yarn only to realize that it had jumped two versions (three now, apparently) I had to learn a bunch of new shit. I was like, nah, back to npm for me.

For comparison, not long ago I switched from pipenv to poetry and that was pretty much drop-in, with nevertheless markedly incremental improvements.

I love UI development. If only I could get to building the actual thing…

specialp• 3 years ago

Yarn made the same mistake going from 1 to 2 as Angular did. The newer version was so different. Both should have been named something else. At a certain point of incompatibility and divergence it is a different product, and the benefit you get from using a well known name is outweighed but the cost of confusion.

Yarn 2 brought a lot of great improvements but since it was named "Yarn" people were expecting it to behave somewhat like the first one.

diggan3• 3 years ago

Sometimes I wish for a SemVer iteration that does away with the major version, and requires a project to create a new library wholesale if they want to increment the major version. Every library would have minor and patch releases, but if they want to substantially change the API, they'll have to create a new library instead and ask people to move to it instead.

svieira• 3 years ago

This is similar to what Rich Hickey suggests in Spec-ulation [1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk

politelemon• 3 years ago

The problem with semver is what constitutes "substantially"; because it's been left to subjective interpretation, we end up with these weird situations. What may invoke a feeling of "This should have been a new library" is different for each team. Even a minor change with a deprecated method can invoke such a reaction depending on how a team has been using that library.

kreutz• 3 years ago

Just use bun

fastball2• 3 years ago

I wanted to use Bun for our app but couldn't due to a lack of support for `postinstall` scripts at the moment.

thegoleffect• 3 years ago

As in the dependencies you add don't run their postinstall scripts or your app's package defines a postinstall and that script doesn't run?

The latter should work but the former requires an extra step for now iirc: https://bun.sh/docs/cli/install#lifecycle-scripts

jxi4• 3 years ago

As a Bun convert, it's interesting that they felt the need to have a preemptive response for Bun as part of this major release. The response itself seems unconvincing though: Basically, Bun is a lot faster and simpler, but they think they can catch up.

I'm not convinced they can catch up even on speed, and Bun ergonomics are also a lot nicer from the get go.

solardev5• 3 years ago

Were you using Bun on a new project? I tried it on a few existing ones and couldn't get it to build on any of them

jxi4• 3 years ago

Converted existing large NPM workspace-based projects. It depends which part of Bun you're talking about. Do you mean the package manager didn't work or the runtime didn't work? I would be a bit surprised if the package manager was not a drop-in replacement, but I know they recently fixed a lot of bugs too.

deliriumchn• 3 years ago

Basically, Bun is a lot faster and simpler

Funny enough, I got our work project working with yarn berry (whatever number this was this summer) in 10-15 minutes, but I couldn't manage to do the same with bun. I'll try again now after they got few minor updates probably just to see if its better now...

jxi4• 3 years ago

What didn't work? What was the error?

solardev5• 3 years ago

Yarn's versioning is really confusing. Is 4.0 compatible with 1.x? Is it a successor to Yarn 2 (with the different functionality)? What happened to 3? Haven't really kept up with this since 2 wouldn't work with any of my projects, not sure where to pick up again now...

depr3• 3 years ago

I mean... Why would it be compatible with 1.x if 2 wasn't? There is an upgrade guide to upgrade from 1 to 2 and later. 3 has been out for a long time. Not sure how their versioning is confusing. It uses the major version number to signal (possibly) breaking changes.

solardev5• 3 years ago

IME most projects use semver to indicate possibly breaking changes that might require a manual fix or three, not a whole different project that requires 100% changes across the board and starting over from scratch. Even node itself doesn't just kill your projects with every major version.

Judging by the other comments in this thread, and the blog post saying that "zero-install is disabled by default", I had kinda hoped 4 would be a reboot of Yarn v1 with modern conveniences. This does not appear to be the case.

I'm still not sure whether it goes like "2.x -> 3.x -> 4.x are all in the same line, and upgrading from 2 to anything beyond that is easy" or if they are each as different from each other as 2 was from 1. That's the confusing part. (Like, did the 2.x line stabilize into 4.x, or are these just four separate projects altogether?)

I think it would've been a lot clearer if they just named Yarn 2+ something entirely different, like Moment did with Luxon

HatchedLake721• 3 years ago

Am I the only one that after doing Node.js for ~10 years never had much issues with npm or a need for yarn?

Yes, if memory serves me right, yarn might've been first with `yarn.lock` before `package-lock.json` was a thing.

But why would I use yarn today?

I don't care about speed of npm install locally, I do it once in a blue moon.

I don't care if my pipeline takes 3 minutes (yarn) to install dependencies instead of 5 minutes (npm).

gryn• 3 years ago

the reason to try yarn for me was berry pnp to avoid those pesky node_module folders but alas the experience has been bumpy on personal projects. for something that has promised more robustness, it has been anything but that.

I still like the yarn cli more than the npm one, but I ended up just defaulting to npm.

lucideer• 3 years ago

But why would I use yarn today?

I think many many many people switched to Yarn 1.x wholesale and then switched back to NPM once it had undergone some improvements.

leptons• 3 years ago

That's me. But for some projects I've had to switch back to yarn, because npm no longer works to install node_modules, and I don't really care why. Yarn works on those projects, npm does not. If npm works for a project, I use that, but there are some where yarn works and npm simply errors and quits.

spankalee3• 3 years ago

This is exactly what I did. I even participated in the Yarn project a bit before it was fully open, but as npm 6 and 7 brought major speed improvements, workspaces, and overrides, I don't see the need for an alternate package manager anymore. As a library maintainer using the same package manager that most of my users do is a pretty big help.

I'll be very happy when npm's linked install strategy is stable so that there's less reason to use pnpm and we get dependency isolation in monorepos.

koromak• 3 years ago

I did the same, switched back to npm in 2018/19 as I saw the majority of packages I was using doing the same.

But in 2022-2023, I feel like I'm starting to see a lot of yarn again. Maybe just anecdotal, or maybe something changed I'm not aware of.

ruffrey• 3 years ago

Same here. Npm seems to have fixed the lock file issues it had, which was the main reason. With caching, npm is fine. On large projects npm ci can take 2 minutes - we leverage node modules cache on the lock file hash, and it’s typically fast.

joduplessis2• 3 years ago

Workspaces is where npm falls apart.

Inviz• 3 years ago

What are your problems with workspaces? For my use it works pretty well:

* Deduplicates versions of packages across workspaces (desirable for some projects)

* No-configuration linking between workspace modules

* Doesnt force using a specific structure

* Top level module can be used to specify shared versions

steve_adams_86• 3 years ago

Yeah, my major foray into Yarn was to create workspaces for a monorepo without adopting other larger libraries with significant buy-in. I was glad I did it, and my team was, but it was a super-hairy experience trying to get all of the tooling happy within workspaces. I'm sure it's all a lot nicer these days.

meiraleal• 3 years ago

Npm served well but recently I've being noticing that I don't need NPM at all. For the frontend ESM modules from urls works very well. For the backend, deno can be a good alternative if it means not needing to use npm anymore.

a13o• 3 years ago

I view yarn as collective leverage over npm's product roadmap.

As long as the npm roadmap doesn't stray too far from what developers want, or ship those things too slowly, there should be no need to use yarn.

But for that to work, yarn needs to remain a credible alternative, so that it's actually possible to overcome the switching cost.

MuffinFlavored• 3 years ago

Recently ran into a project that uses https://pnpm.io/

Add that to the mix...

In a similar vein,

https://github.com/lerna/lerna

I am not sure when to use `npm workspaces` instead of lerna now? It seems like the answer (for me at least) was "you don't need lerna anymore given recent (past 2 years) NPM updates"

stephen• 3 years ago

Kinda surprised by all the "stuck on Yarn v1" comments so far...

We went through the same "~2015 everyone uses yarn", "~2020 everyone goes back to npm" cycle, but in the last ~year or so are back on yarn v3 for...reasons that I forget (oh yeah, the ability to download multiple platform libs for when you're running in docker [1])...but :shrug: it's been great.

My only complaint is that `yarn dedupe` should be automatic (as it was in yarn v1), or at least via a flag. :-D

But otherwise yarn v3 (with the node_modules linker) has been great, and look forward to using v4.

[1] here's the "afaict npm can't do this?" snippet we use in `.yarnrc.yml`: https://gist.github.com/stephenh/43c7f15b97b73baf821f2a22c62...

depr3• 3 years ago

Skipped v2, v3 works fine for me as well.

swsieber2• 3 years ago

I was a yarn 2+ convert because of how much faster installs were (and the corresponding reduced disk bloat). It unfortunately doesn't play well with Angular, and lots of people fall back to the "node_modules" strategy which does away with much of the benefits.

Is there any good comparison out there of the JS package managers, and the trade-offs they make? I happen to really like the disk/time vs compatibility trade-off yarn 2 makes, but not the zero-install (which had been the default for a time). But hearing that Bun is faster, and better ergonomics? And other people mentioning pnpm? That makes want a package manager in depth comparison.

swsieber2• 3 years ago

I want to take a minute on rant about the insanity that is having node_modules used a caching location. That's the big reason for the incompatibility for between npm and any package manager that attempts to clean up the node_modules mess (though the impact varies by solution). Maybe I'm just spoiled, coming from java, where you can expect your libraries to be in a read-only archive, and that tools separate the runtime from their cache.

5e92cb50239222b• 3 years ago

Just use pnpm. It uses the same node_modules so you get 100% compatibility with all sorts of frameworks/build systems/IDEs, but stores all files in a single global content-addressable directory, and hardlinks everything from there (or reflinks if your filesystem supports it). It also hides indirect dependencies so you don't import them accidentally (you can still use a flattened directory if you need it).

If you install libfoo@1.0.0 and libfoo@1.0.1 and the only difference between them is a single file, the second copy will only add that file to disk.

If you then install that libfoo@1.0.0 into a hundred projects spread across your disk, no files will be copied (both reflinks and hardlinks only add a bit of filesystem metadata).

https://pnpm.io/feature-comparison

https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm#benchmark

jmull• 3 years ago

What is the value proposition of this over npm?

(I last looked at this closely way back... back then it solved problems I didn't have and didn't solve the problems I did have.)

microflash• 3 years ago

Yarn lost the plot when going to v2. It was very different from v1. Even attempting a migration was painful enough to write it off completely in the projects I was working on. I've yet to come across any new projects using Yarn since then. Now, I think it is too late. pnpm has more or less caught up and even surpassed any advantages Yarn had, with a much more pragmatic compatibility across multiple platforms.

Personally, I've moved on to pnpm (with npm as a fallback when I can't use pnpm).

k__3• 3 years ago

Haven't used this until today, but I browsed the code and the docs and it all made a very solid impression.

joduplessis2• 3 years ago

Nice job team!

k__3• 3 years ago

lol,

I just installed Yarn for the first time and got version 4.0.0, what a coincidence!

A clean major version? At this time of the year? In this part of the world?

I've never been more suspicious of a tool :D

But the codebase is really nice, especially the comments in the plugin system.

I'm SO gonna extend that thing.

bhouston2• 3 years ago

I find there is less room for yarn in the ecosystem than back when npm was crazy slow.

In my testing, npm has gotten a lot faster that it used to be and often it is faster than yarn 3.x when doing installs in a CI system. npm also has decent workspace support, excluding the important ability to do topological sort-based builds (which I still use lerna for.)

I also found bun install also works great and fast and is a drop in replacement for npm.

doodlesdev2• 3 years ago

Great release which solves the biggest painpoints with the latest Yarn versions. I still like zero-installs and yarnPath providing Yarn for anyone using the project, but not having zero installs and using corepack to provide Yarn seems like the right choice which reduces friction for adoption.

Also, not having to install plugins such as interactive-tools is sooooo good. I have no ideia why these are plugins in the first place as they are so essential to using Yarn.

I still wish PnP faced better adoption though. In most projects I still go back to using the pnpm or the node-modules linker because of various issues with PnP which are sometimes hard to debug.

In other notes, why the hell in Node corepack still experimental and not enabled by default? I simply don't get it.

solatic6• 3 years ago

We switched already to pnpm and won't look back.

Hardened Mode, constraints engine

a) pin your dependencies, set save-prefix='' in .npmrc, use a tool like pnpm outdated, Renovate, Dependabot, npm-check-updates to keep them updated. Doesn't need to be done or enforced in the package manager, Git Hooks and CI are sufficient. b) use syncpack to ensure all your dependencies in different workspaces use the same versions. This doesn't need to be done in the package manager.

pnpm also has pnpm licenses to help keep compliance happy.

If someone wants to write a package manager in Rust for speed (pnpm is already moving in this direction, see https://github.com/pnpm/pn and https://github.com/pnpm/pacquet ), we'd take a look. Otherwise - not enough benefit to switching away.

silverwind• 3 years ago

Said rust npm package manager already exists, but it's somewhat buggy still:

https://github.com/orogene/orogene

solatic6• 3 years ago

Interesting, but no support for workspaces yet: https://github.com/orogene/orogene/issues/161

__jonas5• 3 years ago

I'm just trying to switch to pnpm and I'm a bit lost on how to dockerize packages in my workspace, something that I thought would be a common thing to do.

The example in their docs [1] seems to just be wrong

FROM common AS app1
COPY --from=prod-deps /app/packages/app1/node_modules/ /app/packages/app1/node_modules
COPY --from=build /app/packages/app1/dist /app/packages/app1/dist

This of course will not work, since the node_modules folders of packages in a pnpm workspace just contain symlinks to the virtual store at the root of the monorepo, not the actual modules. I don't see any good way to do what this example pretends to achieve (minimize docker image build size) since even when hoisting is forced, pnpm seems to only ever hoist node_modules in the root of the repo.

Sorry for this somewhat unrelated rant, I was just surprised at hitting such an obstacle immediately after trying to adopt pnpm after I heard so much praise for this tool.

[1] https://pnpm.io/docker#example-2-build-multiple-docker-image...

mirekrusin• 3 years ago

Bundle your backend code to single file just like you'd bundle f/e.

solatic6• 3 years ago

Checkout Depot's example Dockerfile for node + pnpm: https://depot.dev/docs/languages/node-pnpm-dockerfile which is best-practices based even if you're not using Depot. They also explain each of the lines in the Dockerfile.

As someone struggling with Docker caching at work at the moment, I think your problem is less with pnpm and more with the difficulty of writing decent Dockerfiles.

cantSpellSober• 3 years ago

Hardened Mode [...] doesn't need to be done in the package manager

Why not?

erhaetherth4• 3 years ago

If someone wants to write a package manager in Rust for speed

How about Zig?

Seriously, try Bun. It's stupid fast. Even if you don't use all its other features, just try "bun install".

solatic6• 3 years ago

Doesn't support pnpm workspaces, only package.json workspaces: https://bun.sh/docs/install/workspaces

pnpm is more than just pnpm install, there's an evolving ecosystem of tools. For a mainstream project looking for tools to depend on, either everything supports bun, or it might as well be nothing.

ulrischa• 3 years ago

I'm not so deep in front end. Can somebody explain me the differences to npm?

IceDane2• 3 years ago

Yarn 2 was just a colossal mistake. In nearly any real project it causes constant churn and is just a perfect example of what happens when you let some computer scientist do whatever they feel is nice from a theoretical perspective rather than based in reality.

There isn't even any arguing with it being an abject failure. It's just abundantly obvious when you look at how many people keep using yarn 1. These patch notes even prove it since they realized how insane it is to make their zero install thing the default.

h1fra3• 3 years ago

We have been writing our own rules at Datadog with this framework for a couple of months now, with great success

Did I miss something, Yarn has been acquired by Datadog or is it poor wording?

depr3• 3 years ago

The maintainer works at Datadog.

h1fra3• 3 years ago

ah I didn't knew that, thanks

Krastan• 3 years ago

I've been waiting for this for the .env support for .yarnrc.yml. we can now have our GitHub PATs in a .env instead of having to add it to your shell env or risk leaking it or putting thr PAT directly in the .yarn.yml

firebaze• 3 years ago

Why can't the JS ecosystem simply accept its non-complexity, deal with it and be done?

I know my share of frontend technology, React, Angular, AngularJS, MUI, Bootstrap and so on, Vue, Next, Nuxt, Svelte. Others.

None of it is really complex, there are competing, but increasingly incorporating patterns at play, just fighting for views, stars and clicks.

In the end, it boils down to the ever same boilerplate JS feeding a browser.

Please don't misunderstand me: JS can as complex as any "turing-complete"¹ language. But the things which seem to bother us have been solved over and over again, and there are no new solutions in sight, but only reformulations.

¹ there is no real turing-complete language out there, since memory is limited. Flamewar inc.

wilg• 3 years ago

I came here to complain about how there are two JS package managers that are virtually identical, and learned there is a third. Fellas, sort this out. This is a waste of human potential.

(I also still think package managers should be language and ecosystem independent. We just need one way of getting named and versioned folders of files from the internet.)

ozim• 3 years ago

I count npm, yarn, bun, pnpm - but I am also not really a frontend guy.

bostonvaulter2• 3 years ago

There's also lerna

madjam002• 3 years ago

Wow so much negativity here, I just can’t imagine not having Yarn PnP for my project with 15+ packages all in a monorepo. It’s super easy to patch 3rd party packages, fast at installing and adding new dependencies, and it plays so nicely with Nix which is great for CI/CD, as with a bit of tooling all of your packages will be cached between builds.

Even some “heavyweight” frameworks which I didn’t expect to work, work fine, such as NextJS.

I’m a very happy Yarn Berry user.

rtsao• 3 years ago

Yarn 2.0 was ambitious, but in hindsight, it probably would have been better to make regular node_modules the default rather than pushing PnP and zero installs (and alienating most users in the process).

I think Yarn Berry with node_modules linker is strictly better than Yarn 1.0, whereas PnP and zero installs involve tradeoffs that might not be right for everyone. There's a lot of great design decisions in Berry that gets muddled with all the PnP-related discussion. I will say Maël deserves a lot of credit for driving corepack, which makes version control of package management totally seamless. It's always been a total nightmare but now it's shockingly easy.

Alifatisk• 3 years ago

What do I benefit from using Yarn over Pnpm?

jimrandomh• 3 years ago

I'm also in the "still using Yarn 1.x" camp. The problem is that yarn is installed to the global path by a package manager from outside the Javascript ecosystem, which means that the same install of yarn is shared between all the projects I might run on my system, including projects I don't maintain myself and including projects that aren't maintained at all. I'm open to other JS package managers if they offer benefits, but the one that runs when I type "yarn" in my shell has to be backwards-compatible with 1.x, forever. Repositories like Debian/apt-get and homebrew operate on a similar philosophy, and still offer only 1.x.

So... why didn't they just put a package-manager version number in package.json? I would have no problem with projects requiring Yarn 2+, if upgrading to Yarn 2+ didn't create an obstacle to continuing to run everything else that still uses Yarn 1. As it is now, I'm not willing to even _try_ the newer versions, because I expect to have to revert and I'm worried that I'll lose a day to the mess that the uninstall/revert will create.

sod• 3 years ago

The history of yarn is fascinating. Dependency management in our monorepo is super smooth since we use it. We are on version 3.6 right now.

I admire that arcanis tried something very bold with plug and play and zero installs in version 2 and 3, but is willing to default back to node_modules since it didn't stick. Must have been hard to come up with something this good, but then nearly everyone rejecting it.

Yarn 4.0

Related Stories