As technical lead, I want to switch from Yarn to NPM

[jorgegonzalez]

Description:

Our JavaScript package manager [email protected] is practically unmaintained since the release of [email protected]. This means that yarn "v1" will never release new updates or features beyond vulnerability fixes.

The maintainers recommend users migrate to yarn "v2", which, due to technical complexities in v2, may not be feasible for our project. v2 was released with a change to the node_modules architecture that is fundamentally incompatible with our app.

This is illustrated in the below screenshot. Notice how v1 still has 1.5 million weekly downloads and v2 only averages some 600, a year after its initial release. The likely cause is still the incompatibility with many packages in the JS ecosystem like webpack, that will likely never be fixed.

I formally recommend we migrate to [email protected].

• It supports deterministic builds, something yarn v1 was created to solve.
• Supports workspaces, another thing yarn was created for.
• Is being actively developed by Microsoft themselves, and is unlikely to be abandoned like yarn v1.
• It has improved performance and beat yarn in some benchmarks. An oft-cited reason for using yarn over npm in the past was significant speed differences that are arguably negligible now.
• npm serves as the official JavaScript package manager, in that it is included with Node.js and doesn't require additional configuration or installations

Acceptance Criteria:

• Remove yarn and implement npm as alternative
• Have a new lockfile and package manager

Tasks:

• Remove yarn and implement npm as alternative
• Document local steps needed for switching off yarn
• Update relevant README documents with npm instead of yarn

Notes:

• Is yarn 1.x still maintained? yarnpkg/yarn#8583

[jorgegonzalez]

And a chart of npm vs yarn showing its dominance.

[amilash]

tag @abottoms-coder

[valcollignon]

Need to discuss audits as a part of each release. @ADPennington to try to find a relevant issue to link to. This ticket is a nice-to-have and is not necessarily a priority at this time. Per backlog refinement 12.7.21.

[ArtemFrontendACTUM]

npm vs yarn