Facebook Launches Yarn, a New Package Manager for Javascript

Just today, Facebook launched its new Javascript manager called Yarn, in collaboration with Google, Exponent and Tilde. As the size of Facebook’s codebase continues to grow, they were experiencing issues with their consistency, security and performance. Many engineers have used the npm package manager to find and reuse existing code when working with Javascript or Node.js. After realizing that npm was not working well for Facebook due to performance limitations, Yarn was created with the purpose of being a fast, reliable and secure alternative npm client.

Yarn is a new package manager that has its own workflow for the npm client and other package managers while still being compatible with the npm registry. Yarn allows engineers to be more efficient when using shared code by enabling them to focus on building new products and features. Facebook’s engineers can install packages more quickly and manage dependencies in  secure offline environments. Yarn’s performance was tested on every major JS framework and for additional non-Facebook uses.

Some of the benefits that Yarn provides are:

• it caches files locally and more efficiently than npm
• it is able to parallelize some of its operations which speeds up the install process for new modules
• it removed the npm feature that allowed developers to execute other code that is needed as part of the install process (which is more secure)

Yarn is currently being used at Facebook, and is receiving positive responses. It powers the dependency and package management for many of their Javascript projects. Workflow has been more efficient due to engineers being able to build offline.

Yarn is now available on Github.