Pants vs npm

Overview

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Pants

Stacks23

Followers86

Votes30

GitHub Stars3.7K

Forks674

npm vs Pants: What are the differences?

npm: The package manager for JavaScript. 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; Pants: Build system by Twitter, Foursquare, and Square. Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

npm belongs to "Front End Package Manager" category of the tech stack, while Pants can be primarily classified under "Java Build Tools".

"Best package management system for javascript" is the top reason why over 642 developers like npm, while over 5 developers mention "Creates deployable packages" as the leading cause for choosing Pants.

npm and Pants are both open source tools. It seems that npm with 17.2K GitHub stars and 3.17K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Pants with 1.15K GitHub stars and 328 GitHub forks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on npm, Pants

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	Pants
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.	Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.
-	Builds Java, Scala, and Python.;Adding support for new languages is straightforward.;Supports code generation: thrift, protocol buffers, custom code generators.;Resolves external JVM and Python dependencies.;Runs tests.;Spawns Python and Scala REPLs with appropriate load paths.;Creates deployable packages.;Scales to large repos with many interdependent modules.;Designed for incremental builds.;Support for local and distributed caching.;Especially fast for Scala builds, compared to alternatives.;Builds standalone python executables (PEX files);Has a plugin system to add custom features and override stock behavior.;Runs on Linux and Mac OS X.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.6K	GitHub Stars 3.7K
GitHub Forks 3.0K	GitHub Forks 674
Stacks 137.4K	Stacks 23
Followers 82.2K	Followers 86
Votes 1.6K	Votes 30
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 6 Creates deployable packages 4 Runs tests 4 Scales 4 Runs on Linux 4 Runs on OS X

What are some alternatives to npm, Pants?

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

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.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

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.

Bazel

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

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.

JitPack

JitPack is an easy to use package repository for Gradle/Sbt and Maven projects. We build GitHub projects on demand and provides ready-to-use packages.

SBT

It is similar to Java's Maven and Ant. Its main features are: Native support for compiling Scala code and integrating with many Scala test frameworks.