Lerna vs Yarn

Overview

Yarn

Stacks28.2K

Followers13.5K

Votes151

GitHub Stars41.5K

Forks2.7K

Lerna

Stacks1.2K

Followers137

Votes0

GitHub Stars36.0K

Forks2.3K

Lerna vs Yarn: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the world of JavaScript development, Lerna and Yarn are two popular tools used for managing packages and dependencies. While both tools serve similar purposes, there are key differences that set them apart. In this Markdown formatted code, we will explore and compare these differences between Lerna and Yarn.

Use Case: Lerna is primarily designed to optimize the workflow of managing multiple JavaScript projects within a single Git repository. It provides a set of commands to work with these projects by facilitating package publishing, versioning, and inter-project dependency management. On the other hand, Yarn focuses on improving package management on the developer's machine by providing faster and more reliable installation of dependencies.
Monorepo Support: Lerna is specifically built for managing monorepos, allowing developers to keep multiple related packages in a single repository. It helps in versioning and making changes across packages easier. In contrast, Yarn can be used with both monorepos and single-package projects, providing flexibility in different project structures.
Dependency Management: Lerna uses a flat dependency management approach, where dependencies are hoisted to the root of the monorepo and shared among packages. This helps reduce duplication of dependencies and saves disk space. Yarn, on the other hand, uses a nested dependency management approach, where each package manages its own dependencies. This ensures package isolation but can lead to larger disk space usage.
Lockfile Handling: Lerna generates a single lockfile for the entire monorepo, ensuring consistent dependency resolution across packages. This simplifies the process of ensuring consistent dependencies across packages. On the other hand, Yarn generates separate lockfiles for each package, providing more granular control over dependencies and allowing for finer-grained updates.
Community Support: Lerna has a strong focus on monorepo workflows and is widely used in the JavaScript community for managing complex project structures. It has an active community and solid documentation to support its users. Yarn, being a package manager, has a larger user base due to its ability to work with different project structures and has extensive community support and documentation.
Integration with npm: Lerna integrates seamlessly with npm, as it uses the existing npm registry for package publishing and sharing. This makes it easier for developers to adopt Lerna without major disruptions to their existing workflows. Yarn, on the other hand, has its own registry, the Yarn registry, which provides additional features like faster package downloads. However, this can require additional configuration and might need adjustments for existing npm workflows.

In Summary, Lerna is specifically designed for optimal management of monorepos, while Yarn focuses on improving package management on the developer's machine with flexible support for different project structures.

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Advice on Yarn, Lerna

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

Yarn	Lerna
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.	It is a popular and widely used package written in JavaScript. It optimizes the workflow around managing multi-package repositories with git and npm.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 41.5K	GitHub Stars 36.0K
GitHub Forks 2.7K	GitHub Forks 2.3K
Stacks 28.2K	Stacks 1.2K
Followers 13.5K	Followers 137
Votes 151	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
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	No community feedback yet
Integrations
JavaScript npm	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Yarn, Lerna?

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.

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.

Underscore

A JavaScript library that provides a whole mess of useful functional programming helpers without extending any built-in objects.

Browserify

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

Deno

It is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript built with V8, Rust, and Tokio.

Chart.js

Visualize your data in 6 different ways. Each of them animated, with a load of customisation options and interactivity extensions.

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.

Immutable.js

Immutable provides Persistent Immutable List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record. They are highly efficient on modern JavaScript VMs by using structural sharing via hash maps tries and vector tries as popularized by Clojure and Scala, minimizing the need to copy or cache data.

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.

Lodash

A JavaScript utility library delivering consistency, modularity, performance, & extras. It provides utility functions for common programming tasks using the functional programming paradigm.

Related Comparisons

Lerna vs Yarn: What are the differences?

Introduction

Use Case: Lerna is primarily designed to optimize the workflow of managing multiple JavaScript projects within a single Git repository. It provides a set of commands to work with these projects by facilitating package publishing, versioning, and inter-project dependency management. On the other hand, Yarn focuses on improving package management on the developer's machine by providing faster and more reliable installation of dependencies.
Monorepo Support: Lerna is specifically built for managing monorepos, allowing developers to keep multiple related packages in a single repository. It helps in versioning and making changes across packages easier. In contrast, Yarn can be used with both monorepos and single-package projects, providing flexibility in different project structures.
Dependency Management: Lerna uses a flat dependency management approach, where dependencies are hoisted to the root of the monorepo and shared among packages. This helps reduce duplication of dependencies and saves disk space. Yarn, on the other hand, uses a nested dependency management approach, where each package manages its own dependencies. This ensures package isolation but can lead to larger disk space usage.
Lockfile Handling: Lerna generates a single lockfile for the entire monorepo, ensuring consistent dependency resolution across packages. This simplifies the process of ensuring consistent dependencies across packages. On the other hand, Yarn generates separate lockfiles for each package, providing more granular control over dependencies and allowing for finer-grained updates.
Community Support: Lerna has a strong focus on monorepo workflows and is widely used in the JavaScript community for managing complex project structures. It has an active community and solid documentation to support its users. Yarn, being a package manager, has a larger user base due to its ability to work with different project structures and has extensive community support and documentation.
Integration with npm: Lerna integrates seamlessly with npm, as it uses the existing npm registry for package publishing and sharing. This makes it easier for developers to adopt Lerna without major disruptions to their existing workflows. Yarn, on the other hand, has its own registry, the Yarn registry, which provides additional features like faster package downloads. However, this can require additional configuration and might need adjustments for existing npm workflows.

Lerna vs Yarn

Overview