Introduction#

Yarn is a package manager for Node.js, similar to npm. While sharing a lot of common ground, there are some key differences between Yarn and npm.

Yarn Installation

This example explains the different methods to install Yarn for your OS.

macOS

Homebrew

brew update
brew install yarn

MacPorts

sudo port install yarn

Adding Yarn to your PATH

Add the following to your preferred shell profile (.profile, .bashrc, .zshrc etc)

export PATH="$PATH:`yarn global bin`"

Windows

Installer

First, install Node.js if it is not already installed.

Download the Yarn installer as an .msi from the Yarn website.

Chocolatey

choco install yarn

Linux

Debian / Ubuntu

Ensure Node.js is installed for your distro, or run the following

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

Configure the YarnPkg repository

curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list

Install Yarn

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install yarn

CentOS / Fedora / RHEL

Install Node.js if not already installed

curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | bash -

Install Yarn

sudo wget https://dl.yarnpkg.com/rpm/yarn.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/yarn.repo
sudo yum install yarn

Arch

Install Yarn via AUR.

Example using yaourt:

yaourt -S yarn

Solus

sudo eopkg install yarn

All Distributions

Add the following to your preferred shell profile (.profile, .bashrc, .zshrc etc)

export PATH="$PATH:`yarn global bin`"

Alternative Method of Installation

Shell script

curl -o- -L https://yarnpkg.com/install.sh | bash

or specify a version to install

curl -o- -L https://yarnpkg.com/install.sh | bash -s -- --version [version]

Tarball

cd /opt
wget https://yarnpkg.com/latest.tar.gz
tar zvxf latest.tar.gz

Npm

If you already have npm installed, simply run

npm install -g yarn

Post Install

Check the installed version of Yarn by running

yarn --version

Creating a basic package

The yarn init command will walk you through the creation of a package.json file to configure some information about your package. This is similar to the npm init command in npm.

Create and navigate to a new directory to hold your package, and then run yarn init

mkdir my-package && cd my-package
yarn init

Answer the questions that follow in the CLI

question name (my-package): my-package
question version (1.0.0): 
question description: A test package
question entry point (index.js): 
question repository url: 
question author: StackOverflow Documentation
question license (MIT): 
success Saved package.json
✨  Done in 27.31s.

This will generate a package.json file similar to the following

{
  "name": "my-package",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "A test package",
  "main": "index.js",
  "author": "StackOverflow Documentation",
  "license": "MIT"
}

Now lets try adding a dependency. The basic syntax for this is yarn add [package-name]

Run the following to install ExpressJS

yarn add express

This will add a dependencies section to your package.json, and add ExpressJS

"dependencies": {
    "express": "^4.15.2"
}

Install package with Yarn

Yarn uses the same registry that npm does. That means that every package that is a available on npm is the same on Yarn.

To install a package, run yarn add package.

If you need a specific version of the package, you can use yarn add package@version.

If the version you need to install has been tagged, you can use yarn add package@tag.