Git vs npm

Overview

Git

Stacks343.6K

Followers184.2K

Votes6.6K

GitHub Stars57.1K

Forks26.9K

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Git vs npm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Git and npm both serve important roles in the world of software development, but they differ significantly in their functionalities and purposes. This markdown code will present the key differences between Git and npm, explaining their unique characteristics and features.

Git: Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) for Source Code Management: Git is primarily used for version control and source code management. It allows developers to keep track of changes made to a codebase, collaborate with team members, and easily merge and manage multiple branches of code. Git ensures the integrity and consistency of the code and allows developers to revert to previous versions if needed.
npm: Package Manager for JavaScript: npm, on the other hand, is a package manager specifically designed for JavaScript. It helps developers easily share and reuse code by providing a vast repository of libraries and packages. npm allows developers to manage dependencies, handle project dependencies automatically, and keep track of the versions of installed packages. It provides tools to publish, discover, and install packages, making it a vital component of modern JavaScript development.
Git: Entire codebase stored locally: Git stores the complete history and codebase locally on each developer's machine. This allows developers to work offline, make changes, and commit them to their local repository. Git also enables branching and merging, which facilitates collaboration and helps in managing complex development workflows.
npm: Relies on remote package registry: In contrast, npm relies on a central remote registry where packages are stored. When a package is required, npm automatically downloads it from the registry and installs it in the project directory. This centralized approach ensures consistency and ease of package management but requires an internet connection for package installation and updates.
Git: Tracks changes at a fine-grained level: Git tracks the changes made to each file and line of code, providing detailed information about who made the changes and when. This fine-grained tracking allows for precise version control and makes it easier to identify and fix issues. Git also enables rolling back to previous versions and cherry-picking specific changes from different branches.
npm: Simplifies dependency management and versioning: npm simplifies the management of project dependencies by automatically resolving and installing the required packages. It also ensures version compatibility by using semantic versioning. Developers can easily specify the versions of dependencies in a package.json file, and npm handles the installation of the correct versions.

In summary, Git is primarily a distributed version control system used for tracking changes in source code, offering features like branching and merging. On the other hand, npm is a package manager designed specifically for JavaScript, providing a repository of libraries and simplifying dependency management for projects.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Git, npm

StackShare

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?"

294k views294k

Comments

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.

251k views251k

Comments

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.

310k views310k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Git	npm
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 57.1K	GitHub Stars 17.6K
GitHub Forks 26.9K	GitHub Forks 3.0K
Stacks 343.6K	Stacks 137.4K
Followers 184.2K	Followers 82.2K
Votes 6.6K	Votes 1.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros 1429 Distributed version control system 1053 Efficient branching and merging 959 Fast 843 Open source 726 Better than svn Cons 16 Hard to learn 11 Inconsistent command line interface 9 Easy to lose uncommitted work 8 Worst documentation ever possibly made 5 Awful merge handling	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 Problems with lockfiles 5 Bad at package versioning and being deterministic 3 Node-gyp takes forever 1 Super slow

What are some alternatives to Git, npm?

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.

Mercurial

Mercurial is dedicated to speed and efficiency with a sane user interface. It is written in Python. Mercurial's implementation and data structures are designed to be fast. You can generate diffs between revisions, or jump back in time within seconds.

SVN (Subversion)

Subversion exists to be universally recognized and adopted as an open-source, centralized version control system characterized by its reliability as a safe haven for valuable data; the simplicity of its model and usage; and its ability to support the needs of a wide variety of users and projects, from individuals to large-scale enterprise operations.

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.

Plastic SCM

Plastic SCM is a distributed version control designed for big projects. It excels on branching and merging, graphical user interfaces, and can also deal with large files and even file-locking (great for game devs). It includes "semantic" features like refactor detection to ease diffing complex refactors.

Pijul

Pijul is a free and open source (AGPL 3) distributed version control system. Its distinctive feature is to be based on a sound theory of patches, which makes it easy to learn and use, and really distributed.

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.

Related Comparisons

Git vs npm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Git: Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) for Source Code Management: Git is primarily used for version control and source code management. It allows developers to keep track of changes made to a codebase, collaborate with team members, and easily merge and manage multiple branches of code. Git ensures the integrity and consistency of the code and allows developers to revert to previous versions if needed.
npm: Package Manager for JavaScript: npm, on the other hand, is a package manager specifically designed for JavaScript. It helps developers easily share and reuse code by providing a vast repository of libraries and packages. npm allows developers to manage dependencies, handle project dependencies automatically, and keep track of the versions of installed packages. It provides tools to publish, discover, and install packages, making it a vital component of modern JavaScript development.
Git: Entire codebase stored locally: Git stores the complete history and codebase locally on each developer's machine. This allows developers to work offline, make changes, and commit them to their local repository. Git also enables branching and merging, which facilitates collaboration and helps in managing complex development workflows.
npm: Relies on remote package registry: In contrast, npm relies on a central remote registry where packages are stored. When a package is required, npm automatically downloads it from the registry and installs it in the project directory. This centralized approach ensures consistency and ease of package management but requires an internet connection for package installation and updates.
Git: Tracks changes at a fine-grained level: Git tracks the changes made to each file and line of code, providing detailed information about who made the changes and when. This fine-grained tracking allows for precise version control and makes it easier to identify and fix issues. Git also enables rolling back to previous versions and cherry-picking specific changes from different branches.
npm: Simplifies dependency management and versioning: npm simplifies the management of project dependencies by automatically resolving and installing the required packages. It also ensures version compatibility by using semantic versioning. Developers can easily specify the versions of dependencies in a package.json file, and npm handles the installation of the correct versions.

Git vs npm

Overview

Git vs npm: What are the differences?