Lerna vs npm

Overview

npm

Stacks137.4K

Followers82.2K

Votes1.6K

GitHub Stars17.6K

Forks3.0K

Lerna

Stacks1.2K

Followers137

Votes0

GitHub Stars36.0K

Forks2.3K

Lerna vs npm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Lerna and npm are both popular tools in the JavaScript ecosystem that assist in managing multi-package JavaScript projects. However, there are some key differences between the two.

Package Management: Lerna is primarily focused on optimizing the management of multiple packages within a single repository. It provides commands to bootstrap, publish, and version packages together. On the other hand, npm is a package manager that allows you to install and manage packages and their dependencies within a project.
Monorepo Support: Lerna is specifically designed to work with monorepos, which are repositories that contain multiple packages. It enables you to perform operations like linking dependencies between packages, running commands across multiple packages, and versioning packages together. On the contrary, npm does not have built-in support for managing monorepos, and additional tools like npm workspaces or manual setups are often used.
Versioning: Lerna provides a versioning system that allows you to handle the versioning of packages within a monorepo. It ensures that the version numbers of packages are synchronized and provides tools for releasing and publishing new versions. npm, on the other hand, manages versioning at the package level. Each package has its own distinct version number independent of other packages in the project.
Dependency Management: Lerna allows you to link dependencies between packages in a monorepo, enabling you to use packages from other packages within the same repository. This can be particularly useful in scenarios where you are developing multiple interdependent packages. npm manages dependencies at the package level, resolving and installing dependencies for each package individually.
Command Line Interface: Lerna provides a command line interface (CLI) that offers various commands for managing packages in a monorepo. These commands include bootstrapping packages, running scripts across packages, publishing packages, and more. npm, being a package manager, also offers a CLI with commands for installing, updating, and publishing packages, among others.
Community and Ecosystem: npm has a larger and more extensive community and ecosystem compared to Lerna. As a result, npm has a wider range of packages and tools available, making it easier to find solutions to common problems. Lerna, being more specialized for monorepo management, has a smaller community, but still provides valuable support and documentation.

In summary, the key differences between Lerna and npm lie in their focus on monorepo management, package versioning, dependency handling, and the available CLI commands. Lerna is specifically designed for managing packages within a monorepo, while npm is a more general-purpose package manager.

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Advice on npm, 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

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	Lerna
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.	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 17.6K	GitHub Stars 36.0K
GitHub Forks 3.0K	GitHub Forks 2.3K
Stacks 137.4K	Stacks 1.2K
Followers 82.2K	Followers 137
Votes 1.6K	Votes 0
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	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to npm, Lerna?

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.

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.

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 npm: What are the differences?

Introduction

Lerna and npm are both popular tools in the JavaScript ecosystem that assist in managing multi-package JavaScript projects. However, there are some key differences between the two.

Package Management: Lerna is primarily focused on optimizing the management of multiple packages within a single repository. It provides commands to bootstrap, publish, and version packages together. On the other hand, npm is a package manager that allows you to install and manage packages and their dependencies within a project.
Monorepo Support: Lerna is specifically designed to work with monorepos, which are repositories that contain multiple packages. It enables you to perform operations like linking dependencies between packages, running commands across multiple packages, and versioning packages together. On the contrary, npm does not have built-in support for managing monorepos, and additional tools like npm workspaces or manual setups are often used.
Versioning: Lerna provides a versioning system that allows you to handle the versioning of packages within a monorepo. It ensures that the version numbers of packages are synchronized and provides tools for releasing and publishing new versions. npm, on the other hand, manages versioning at the package level. Each package has its own distinct version number independent of other packages in the project.
Dependency Management: Lerna allows you to link dependencies between packages in a monorepo, enabling you to use packages from other packages within the same repository. This can be particularly useful in scenarios where you are developing multiple interdependent packages. npm manages dependencies at the package level, resolving and installing dependencies for each package individually.
Command Line Interface: Lerna provides a command line interface (CLI) that offers various commands for managing packages in a monorepo. These commands include bootstrapping packages, running scripts across packages, publishing packages, and more. npm, being a package manager, also offers a CLI with commands for installing, updating, and publishing packages, among others.
Community and Ecosystem: npm has a larger and more extensive community and ecosystem compared to Lerna. As a result, npm has a wider range of packages and tools available, making it easier to find solutions to common problems. Lerna, being more specialized for monorepo management, has a smaller community, but still provides valuable support and documentation.

Lerna vs npm

Overview

Lerna vs npm: What are the differences?