Overview

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Bundler

Stacks1.3K

Followers64

Votes0

Bundler vs npm: What are the differences?

Bundler vs npm

Bundler and npm are package managers used in web development. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between the two.

Package Management: Bundler is primarily used for managing Ruby gems, which are libraries or collections of code. It helps in resolving dependencies and ensuring that the correct versions of gems are installed. On the other hand, npm is the default package manager for Node.js, which is used for managing JavaScript packages. It allows developers to easily install, update, and remove packages from their projects.
Dependency Resolution: Bundler uses a Gemfile.lock file to lock the versions of gems being used in a project. This ensures that the project always uses the same gem versions even if new versions are released. Npm, on the other hand, uses a package-lock.json or yarn.lock file to lock the exact versions of packages being used. This guarantees that other developers working on the project get the same package versions.
Registry: Bundler uses RubyGems as its primary registry for hosting gems. It allows developers to publish and share their gems with the Ruby community. Npm, on the other hand, uses the npm registry, which is a huge public collection of JavaScript packages. It provides a centralized platform for developers to publish and share their JavaScript packages.
Command Line Interface: Bundler has a simple and straightforward command line interface. The most commonly used commands include bundle install to install gems specified in the Gemfile, and bundle exec to run specific commands with the installed gems. Npm, on the other hand, provides a more extensive command line interface. It offers commands to install packages (npm install), update packages (npm update), and run scripts defined in the package.json file, among others.
Scopes: Bundler does not have a built-in concept of scopes. It treats all gems in a project as one global namespace. In contrast, npm has a feature called scopes which allows organizing packages under a specific namespace. This can be useful when working on projects that involve multiple teams or organizations.
Licenses: Bundler does not have built-in license management. It does not enforce any specific license requirements for the gems being used. Npm, on the other hand, includes a detailed and automated license management system. It provides information about the licenses used by each package and allows developers to set license requirements for their own projects.

In summary, the key differences between Bundler and npm lie in their focus on different programming languages (Ruby vs JavaScript), their approach to dependency resolution, the registries they use, their command line interfaces, support for scopes, and built-in license management.

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Advice on npm, Bundler

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Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceon

Node.js

npm

Yarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

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Mark

CTO at Gemsotec bvba

Apr 25, 2019

Reviewon

React

TypeScript

Yarn

I use npm because I also mainly use React and TypeScript. Since several typings (from DefinitelyTyped) depend on the React typings, Yarn tends to mess up which leads to duplicate libraries present (different versions of the same type definition), which hinders the Typescript compiler. Npm always resolves to a single version per transitive dependency. At least that's my experience with both.

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Oleksandr

Senior Software Engineer at joyn

Dec 7, 2019

Decided

As we have to build the application for many different TV platforms we want to split the application logic from the device/platform specific code. Previously we had different repositories and it was very hard to keep the development process when changes were done in multiple repositories, as we had to synchronize code reviews as well as merging and then updating the dependencies of projects. This issues would be even more critical when building the project from scratch what we did at Joyn. Therefor to keep all code in one place, at the same time keeping in separated in different modules we decided to give a try to monorepo. First we tried out lerna which was fine at the beginning, but later along the way we had issues with adding new dependencies which came out of the blue and were not easy to fix. Next round of evolution was yarn workspaces, we are still using it and are pretty happy with dev experience it provides. And one more advantage we got when switched to yarn workspaces that we also switched from npm to yarn what improved the state of the lock file a lot, because with npm package-lock file was updated every time you run npm install, frequent updates of package-lock file were causing very often merge conflicts. So right now we not just having faster dependencies installation time but also no conflicts coming from lock file.

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Detailed Comparison

npm	Bundler
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.	It provides a consistent environment for Ruby projects by tracking and installing the exact gems and versions that are needed. It is an exit from dependency hell, and ensures that the gems you need are present in development, staging, and production.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.6K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 3.0K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 137.4K	Stacks 1.3K
Followers 82.2K	Followers 64
Votes 1.6K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 648 Best package management system for javascript 382 Open-source 327 Great community 148 More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist 112 Nice people matter Cons 5 Bad at package versioning and being deterministic 5 Problems with lockfiles 3 Node-gyp takes forever 1 Super slow	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to npm, Bundler?

RequireJS

RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

Browserify

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Yarn

Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

Component

Component's philosophy is the UNIX philosophy of the web - to create a platform for small, reusable components that consist of JS, CSS, HTML, images, fonts, etc. With its well-defined specs, using Component means not worrying about most frontend problems such as package management, publishing components to a registry, or creating a custom build process for every single app.

Verdaccio

A simple, zero-config-required local private npm registry. Comes out of the box with its own tiny database, and the ability to proxy other registries (eg. npmjs.org), caching the downloaded modules along the way.

pip

It is the package installer for Python. You can use pip to install packages from the Python Package Index and other indexes.

Duo

Duo is a next-generation package manager that blends the best ideas from Component, Browserify and Go to make organizing and writing front-end code quick and painless.

Pika.dev

It is a new kind of package registry for the modern web. It handles formatting, configuring, building and publishing every package on the registry, so that individual authors don't have to.

Ninject

It is a lightning-fast, ultra-lightweight dependency injector for .NET applications. It helps you split your application into a collection of loosely-coupled, highly-cohesive pieces, and then glue them back together in a flexible manner. By using it to support your software's architecture, your code will become easier to write, reuse, test, and modify.

Poetry

It helps you declare, manage and install dependencies of Python projects, ensuring you have the right stack everywhere. It comes with all the tools you might need to manage your projects in a deterministic way.