Homebrew vs npm

Overview

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Homebrew

Stacks590

Followers515

Votes3

GitHub Stars45.3K

Forks10.6K

Homebrew vs npm: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Homebrew and npm

Homebrew and npm are both package managers that are widely used in the software development community. While they serve the same purpose of managing packages and dependencies, there are some key differences between them. Below are six specific differences between Homebrew and npm:

Operating System Compatibility: Homebrew is specifically developed for macOS, while npm is primarily used for package management in Node.js environments, which is compatible with various operating systems including macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Package Types: Homebrew mainly focuses on managing software packages for macOS, including command-line tools, libraries, and applications. On the other hand, npm primarily manages JavaScript packages that are used in Node.js projects, including libraries and frameworks.
Installation Process: Homebrew requires a separate installation process and command-line tool to be set up on macOS systems. However, npm comes bundled with Node.js, so it is automatically installed when Node.js is installed.
Registry: Homebrew uses a centralized formulae repository where all the available software packages are stored. On the contrary, npm has a decentralized approach, which means that anyone can publish packages to the npm registry, resulting in a vast number of packages being available.
Dependency Management: Homebrew does not have built-in support for dependency management. It primarily manages the installation, updating, and removal of individual packages. npm, on the other hand, has robust dependency management capabilities, allowing developers to define and manage dependencies between packages in their Node.js projects.
Command-Line Interface: Homebrew uses its own command-line interface (CLI) that consists of various commands and options specific to Homebrew, making it easy to manage software packages on macOS. npm, on the other hand, has a CLI that provides a wide range of commands and options for managing packages and dependencies in Node.js projects.

In summary, Homebrew is a package manager for macOS, focusing on managing software packages for the operating system, while npm is primarily used for package management in Node.js projects, providing extensive dependency management capabilities for JavaScript packages.

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Advice on npm, Homebrew

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

npm	Homebrew
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.	Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t. Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.6K	GitHub Stars 45.3K
GitHub Forks 3.0K	GitHub Forks 10.6K
Stacks 137.4K	Stacks 590
Followers 82.2K	Followers 515
Votes 1.6K	Votes 3
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	Pros 3 Clean, neat, powerful, fast and furious
Integrations
No integrations available	Ruby cURL GNU Bash

What are some alternatives to npm, Homebrew?

Meteor

A Meteor application is a mix of JavaScript that runs inside a client web browser, JavaScript that runs on the Meteor server inside a Node.js container, and all the supporting HTML fragments, CSS rules, and static assets.

Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.

Elm

Writing HTML apps is super easy with elm-lang/html. Not only does it render extremely fast, it also quietly guides you towards well-architected code.

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.

Julia

Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library.

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.

Racket

It is a general-purpose, multi-paradigm programming language based on the Scheme dialect of Lisp. It is designed to be a platform for programming language design and implementation. It is also used for scripting, computer science education, and research.

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.

PureScript

A small strongly typed programming language with expressive types that compiles to JavaScript, written in and inspired by Haskell.

Related Comparisons

Homebrew vs npm: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Homebrew and npm

Operating System Compatibility: Homebrew is specifically developed for macOS, while npm is primarily used for package management in Node.js environments, which is compatible with various operating systems including macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Package Types: Homebrew mainly focuses on managing software packages for macOS, including command-line tools, libraries, and applications. On the other hand, npm primarily manages JavaScript packages that are used in Node.js projects, including libraries and frameworks.
Installation Process: Homebrew requires a separate installation process and command-line tool to be set up on macOS systems. However, npm comes bundled with Node.js, so it is automatically installed when Node.js is installed.
Registry: Homebrew uses a centralized formulae repository where all the available software packages are stored. On the contrary, npm has a decentralized approach, which means that anyone can publish packages to the npm registry, resulting in a vast number of packages being available.
Dependency Management: Homebrew does not have built-in support for dependency management. It primarily manages the installation, updating, and removal of individual packages. npm, on the other hand, has robust dependency management capabilities, allowing developers to define and manage dependencies between packages in their Node.js projects.
Command-Line Interface: Homebrew uses its own command-line interface (CLI) that consists of various commands and options specific to Homebrew, making it easy to manage software packages on macOS. npm, on the other hand, has a CLI that provides a wide range of commands and options for managing packages and dependencies in Node.js projects.

Homebrew vs npm

Overview

Homebrew vs npm: What are the differences?