Overview

Grunt

Stacks8.5K

Followers5.6K

Votes697

GitHub Stars12.3K

Forks1.5K

Yarn

Stacks24.8K

Followers13.5K

Votes151

GitHub Stars41.5K

Forks2.7K

Grunt vs Yarn: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Grunt and Yarn are both popular build tools used in web development. While they serve similar purposes, there are some key differences between the two.

Installation and Setup: Grunt requires global installation through npm and then configuring Gruntfile.js to define tasks and plugins. On the other hand, Yarn is a package manager that allows developers to easily install, manage, and upgrade packages in their projects without the need for a global installation.
Dependency Management: Grunt relies on npm for dependency management, where developers need to manually specify dependencies in the package.json file. Yarn, being a package manager itself, handles dependencies automatically and efficiently, providing faster and more reliable dependency resolutions.
Build Performance: Grunt relies on its configuration file to define tasks, which can lead to slower build times for larger projects due to the sequential execution of tasks. Yarn, on the other hand, utilizes parallel processing and caching mechanisms to improve build performance, making it faster and more efficient.
Package Installation: Grunt uses npm to install packages, which can sometimes be slow and may result in nested dependencies. Yarn, being optimized for performance, installs packages in a deterministic and parallel manner, ensuring faster and consistent package installations.
Lockfile: Grunt does not have a built-in lockfile mechanism, which means that dependencies can vary across different installations of the same project. Yarn, on the other hand, generates a yarn.lock file that ensures consistent and reproducible installations by locking the versions of all dependencies.
Workspaces and Monorepos: Grunt does not have built-in support for workspaces and monorepos. Yarn, however, provides powerful features for managing multiple packages within a single repository through its workspaces feature.

In summary, Grunt and Yarn differ in terms of installation and setup, dependency management, build performance, package installation, presence of a lockfile, and support for workspaces and monorepos.

Advice on Grunt, Yarn

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

zen-li

Apr 24, 2019

Reviewon

Yarn

p.s.

I am not sure about the performance of the latest version of npm, whether it is different from my understanding of it below. Because I use npm very rarely when I had the following knowledge.

------⏬

I use Yarn because, first, yarn is the first tool to lock the version. Second, although npm also supports the lock version, when you use npm to lock the version, and then use package-lock.json on other systems, package-lock.json Will be modified. You understand what I mean, when you deploy projects based on Git...

250k views250k

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

Grunt	Yarn
The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 12.3K	GitHub Stars 41.5K
GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 2.7K
Stacks 8.5K	Stacks 24.8K
Followers 5.6K	Followers 13.5K
Votes 697	Votes 151
Pros & Cons
Pros 288 Configuration 176 Open source 166 Automation of minification and live reload 60 Great community 7 SASS compilation Cons 1 Poor mindshare/community support	Pros 85 Incredibly fast 22 Easy to use 13 Open Source 11 Can install any npm package 8 Works where npm fails Cons 16 Facebook 7 Sends data to facebook 4 Should be installed separately 3 Cannot publish to registry other than npm
Integrations
No integrations available	JavaScript npm

What are some alternatives to Grunt, Yarn?

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

npm

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.

Webpack

A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

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.

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

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.

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.