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yarnpkg
yarn
JavaScript2016–2023
yarnpkg / yarn

yarn

The 1.x line is frozen - features and bugfixes now happen on https://github.com/yarnpkg/berry

Web DevelopmentDeveloper Tools
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
53Distinct people
57Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
41.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The 1.x line is frozen - features and bugfixes now happen on https://github.com/yarnpkg/berry

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

  • npm/npm · linked in 3 of the same discussions
  • yarnpkg/rfcs · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:01:40 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year57 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-10-11 15:09:15 UTC to 2023-02-28 20:39:14 UTC.

05101520252016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 23 mentions; 5 submissions, 18 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 3 submissions, 10 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 3 submissions, 5 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC23518
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC13310
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC835
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

13 sources
brentvatne·Sep 7, 2017
I can't speak to the original intentions of the authors, but I suspect it might be related to difficulty of making significant changes to the project due to some strongly held beliefs. An example: react-native depends on alpha/beta versions of react, and libraries in the react-native ecosystem tend to include a peer dependency on react (eg: react >= 15). React 16.0.0-alpha.12 will not satisfy this range, but 16.0.0 will. It's unclear to me in what way it is useful to exclude pre-release versions, and this causes a lot of confusion for users. I posted about it here: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/8854 and it was shutdown for ideological reasons, rather than practical considerations. On the other hand, someone submitted a patch to yarn to improve this behaviour and it was quickly accepted: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/pull/3361.
In Yarn 1.0: Workspaces, auto-merging lockfiles, selective versions resolutions
brad0·Sep 7, 2017
I jumped on node around the same time and I've come to an opposite conclusion. The things I liked was the offline cache and the yarn integrity. However there was just too many issues regarding its dependency on npm and not playing nice with other tools such as brew. I dove into the code to try and fix these issues but both the quality of the code base and the politics going on in the issue tracker turned me off very quickly. [1] If yarn had been approached with more senior developers I think it could have replaced npm entirely. [1] https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/2064
In Yarn 1.0: Workspaces, auto-merging lockfiles, selective versions resolutions
gardnr·Aug 23, 2017
Your comment made me actually read the article so I could be properly outraged. The article has a valid argument with a vapid premise. > This difference might initially seem rather insignificant, but it affects the whole software engineering culture. Totally incorrect. I was a late git adopter and would describe myself as a fatigue whiner[1]. The main things that encouraged me to adopt git were the rebase and bisect capabilities. The decentralized aspects had absolutely nothing to do with my adoption of git. The author of the post is basically claiming that I have no idea what I am doing because I do not agree with them. Fuck that. This trash article doesn't belong on HN. It doesn't even promote good critical conversation. [1] https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/1136#issuecomment-316...
In Using Git Wrong
zodiac·Jul 13, 2017
It was making a lot of sense until the part about recursive dependencies. To my mind, once this happens it becomes a dependency graph instead of a tree, and instead of trying to satisfy dependencies "locally" I would work out all the constraints and then solve them. The "choose highest, check parent" algorithm seems to me like it would make results depend on which package in a cycle you tried to resolve first, and apparently with peerdependencies it sometimes is incorrect (https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/422). Any insight as to why it was designed this way? Just the NP-completeness?
In How to build a JavaScript package manager
leipert·Jul 9, 2017
The killer feature for us was a more maintainable lock file. Back when we switched, it was way more readable than the npm-shrinkwrap.json and it is easier to fix merge conflicts in the yarn.lock. And if you are wondering: Why a lockfile? It has also been a game changer, everyone in my team has the same dependencies installs, dependencies do not suddenly break. (Anecdote: Before the switch some dependency of an dependency of an dependency overwrote some Array function, and broke our whole product. I was on vacation and had to fix this remotely, because it was kind of hard to debug). The only obstacles we ran into: 1) private registries did not work, but this has been fixed 2) yarn upgrade command behavior is sometimes funny, but this is going to be fixed soon: - https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/3603 - https://github.com/yarnpkg/rfcs/
Read the rest
blob/master/text/0000-upgrad...
In Npm v5.1.0 Released
ashark·May 26, 2017
A look through their issues on Github will reveal quite a few "npm supports this feature, yarn doesn't, plz add" entries. There are even more "this works in npm but not yarn, and I'm not sure why", many of which are also effectively a result of features/cases that npm supports and yarn doesn't. I don't have an exhaustive list or anything, but it's right there to see if you're interested enough to dig for a minute or two. It's pretty clearly not a drop-in replacement for npm—at least not yet. My experience a couple months ago was that almost anything slightly off the path of the most basic use case rapidly entered "here be dragons" territory, such that every problem became "are we doing something wrong, or is yarn broken again?", which wasn't worth any benefits it provided. If you're just installing packages from NPM, and those packages do
Read the rest
n't do anything even slightly weird, it's probably fine. [EDIT] a running theme of the issues is that a lot of correctness-checking and edge-case handling is missing or incomplete, in addition to some "strange" npm features not being supported. Anyway, here are a couple examples of what I'm talking about: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/3433 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/3507 https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/2090 (last one has a lovely "why are you doing this?" as its first response, from the repo owner for bonus LULZ) FAR from the only ones. IIRC one of our issues had something to do with Yarn totally rewriting the package.json of a package installed from a local directory, removing the "main" entry entirely, which broke it (obviously). Maybe it'll be something I use later, but right now I don't really want to have to wonder whether any given problem is due to some obscure breakage in my package manager when I can... just use npm and not worry about it.
In Npm v5.0.0 released

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