Meet Yarn, Facebooks’ open source JavaScript package manager built for speed

Facebook just launched a JavaScript package manager built specifically for speed. Known as Yarn, the open source package manager according to Facebook promises faster and more reliable installs than the popular npm.

Yarn joins a list of other third-party registry clients that include ied, pnpm, npm-install and npmd.

According to the team behind it, like other third-party registry clients, Yarn takes the list of priorities that  official npm client balances, and shifts them around a little.

Yarn promises to solve a number of problems that Facebook was encountering using npm. It also aims to ensure quicker and more reliable installs by caching every package it downloads. One more interesting thing about it is that it allows package installation on offline environments, as long as you have installed them at least once before.

”Yarn is a new package manager that replaces the existing workflow for the npm client or other package managers while remaining compatible with the npm registry. It has the same feature set as existing workflows while operating faster, more securely, and more reliably.” Facebook software engineers James Kyle, Sebastian McKenzie, and Christoph Pojer wrote in a blog post.

They add that they have already been using Yarn in production at Facebook, and it’s been working really well for the. ” It powers the dependency and package management for many of our JavaScript projects,” they added.

‘’We’re pleased to see Yarn get off to such a great start, and look forward to seeing where it goes.’’ the team at npm said.