Which Node Package Manager should developers use?

By Qrious Tech Team LLP

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As npm has released the v7.4, npm 5 became the default package manager for Node.js. Facebook has also released their own package manager solution “Yarn”. In this article we are going to describe what these package managers offer and which node package is best.

Difference between npm and yarn:

In npm, lock.json package is automatically generated and updated for any operations when the node_modules directory or the package.json file modifies. Also npm install automatically adds installed modules to both package.json and package-lock.json. This file is meant to be committed into the version control you are using. With this feature, npm got feature parity with yarn, when it comes to lock file support.

Yarn has started to address issues that companies using mono repositories ran into at the same time i.e. (monorepos with multiple packages). If you’d like to install dependencies for all of them with npm, that would include going over each directory and issuing npm install in all of them which took too much time. To help with this process, yarn introduced workspaces. In combination with Lerna, it gives package authors a powerful toolset to manage the dependencies and of projects and also enables publishing to be a lot easier. But Yarn does not maintain their registry; they are just pointing their domain to the original npm registry using Cloudflare. On Cloudflare, they can see usage statistics, and the Yarn client leverages Cloudflare's caches. It is complex and took too much time.

Yarn is a very good npm client and a lot of effort went into making Yarn great. I hope we will see the improvements of Yarn incorporated into npm as well, so both users will benefit from the improvements of the others. I recommend to use npm to manage dependencies because it has comes with lock file support & does not send package usage information to Facebook (yarn uses Facebook’s npm registry mirror).