I dove back into React over the past few weeks, and was trying to figure out whether to use NPM or Yarn for package management. NPM has always seemed slow, and in the few times I tried Yarn, it seemed much faster. So I thought I would put them through their paces.
The Projects
I was able to test on a few different projects, some at home and some at work. All were React 18 with some standard functionality (testing, linting, etc), although I did vary between applications using Vite and component libraries that used webpack. While most of our work projects use NPM, I did want to try with Yarn in that environment, and I ended up moving my home environment to Yarn for the test.
The TLDR; version of this is: Yarn is great and fast, but I had so much trouble with authorizing scoped feeds with a Proget NPM feed that I ditched Yarn at work in favor of our NPM standard. At home, where I utilize public packages, it’s not an issue, so I’ll continue using Yarn at home.
Migrating to Yarn
NPM to Yarn 1.x is easy: the commands are pretty much fully compatible, node_modules is still used, and the authentication is pretty much the same. Migrating from Yarn 1 to “modern Yarn” is a little more involved.
However, the migration overall, was easy, at least at home, where I was not dealing with custom registries. At work, I had to use a .yarnrc.yml file to setup some configurations for NPM registries
Notable Differences
Modern Yarn has some different syntaxes, but, overall, is pretty close to its predecessor. It’s notably faster, and if you convert to PNP pacakge management, your node_modules folder goes away.
The package managers are still “somewhat” interchangeable, save for any “npm” commands you may have in custom scripts in your packages.json file. That said, I would NEVER advise you to use different package managers on the same project.
Yarn is much faster than NPM at pretty much every task. Also, the interactive upgrade plugin makes updating packages a breeze. But, I ran into an authentication problem I could not get past.
The Auth Problem
We use Proget for our various feeds. It provides a single repository for packages and container images. For our NPM packages, we have scoped them to our company name.
In configuring Yarn for these scoped repositories, I was never able to get the authentication working so that I could add a package from our private feeds. The error message was something to the effect of Invalid authentication (as an anonymous user). All my searching yielded no good solutions, in spite of hard-coding a valid auth token in the .yarnrc.yml file.
Now, I have been having some “weirder” issues with NPM authentication as well, so I am wondering if it is machine specific. I have NOT yet tested at home, which I will get to. However, my work projects have other deadlines, and I wasn’t about to burn cycles on getting auth to work. So, at work, I backed out of Yarn for the time being.
What to do??
As I mentioned above, some more research is required. I’d like to setup a private feed at home, just to prove that there is either something wrong with my work machine OR something wrong with Yarn connecting to Proget. I’m thinking it’s the former, but, until I can get some time to test, I’ll go with what I know.
That said, if it IS just a local issue, I will make an effort to move to Yarn. I believe the speed improvements are worth it alone, but there are some additional benefits that make it a good choice for package management.
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