Package Managers

Switching from NPM to Yarn

While you may be familiar with npm, or even use it as your package manager of choice, it is not the recommended package manager for this project. This is because Yarn is faster, more reliable, and more extensible than npm. If you are not familiar with Yarn, you can read more about it here.

To download Yarn using npm, run the following command:

npm install -g yarn

This will install Yarn Classic/v1 globally on your machine.

Upgrading to Yarn 3

Why Yarn 3

Yarn 3 includes a host of benefits over Yarn Classic/v1, including:

1. Even faster installs

2. More verbose & readable output

3. Yarn version is stored directly in the repo to keep everyone on the same version

4. Yarn plugins can be added to extend the functionality of Yarn

5. PnP (Plug and Play) mode can be used to improve performance and stability (if supported by your project)

6. Helpful, new commands like yarn dedupe, yarn info, & more

Yarn does not use PnP by default. If you would like to use PnP, you can read more about it here.

Read more about the differences between Yarn Classic/v1 and Yarn 3 here.

Upgrading

To upgrade to Yarn 3 from Yarn Classic/v1, run the following command:

yarn set version berry
yarn install

Yarn Plugins

Now, you can start getting plugins to extend the functionality of Yarn 3.

Yarn-Typescript Plugin

yarn plugin import typescript

This will install the Yarn-TypeScript plugin, which automatically adds @types/ packages into your dependencies when you add a package that doesn't include its own types

Interactive-Tools

yarn plugin import interactive-tools

This will install the Interactive-Tools plugin, which includes the yarn dedupe & yarn upgrade-interactive commands. These commands will help you to remove duplicate packages from your node_modules folder, and upgrade your dependencies to the latest versions.