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  5. Yeoman vs npm

Yeoman vs npm

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Yeoman
Yeoman
Stacks1.7K
Followers1.3K
Votes396
GitHub Stars10.1K
Forks730
npm
npm
Stacks137.4K
Followers82.2K
Votes1.6K
GitHub Stars17.6K
Forks3.0K

Yeoman vs npm: What are the differences?

# Introduction
In the web development world, tools like Yeoman and npm are essential for managing dependencies and project scaffolding. In this comparison, we'll explore the key differences between Yeoman and npm.

1. **Purpose**: Yeoman is mainly a scaffolding tool that provides templates and generators for setting up project structures, while npm is a package manager that handles dependency installation and versioning for JavaScript projects.
2. **Generators vs. Packages**: Yeoman offers generators that automate project setup by creating predefined project structures, whereas npm manages packages that contain reusable code, frameworks, and libraries for a project.
3. **Customization**: Yeoman allows developers to create custom generators or use existing ones to scaffold projects based on specific requirements, while npm focuses on installing and managing package dependencies without much emphasis on custom project setup.
4. **Workflow Automation**: Yeoman is more geared towards streamlining the developer workflow by providing automation tools for tasks like building, testing, and deployment, whereas npm sticks to managing dependencies and script execution within a project.
5. **Community Interaction**: Yeoman has a strong community base that contributes generators and supports the development of custom project setups, while npm's community primarily focuses on managing packages and version dependencies through the npm registry.
6. **Focus on Developer Experience**: Yeoman prioritizes ensuring a user-friendly and efficient developer experience by offering a rich set of generators, whereas npm focuses on package management and providing a seamless way to integrate external dependencies into a project.

In Summary, Yeoman and npm serve distinct purposes in the developer ecosystem, with Yeoman specializing in scaffolding project structures and workflow automation, while npm excels in managing package dependencies for JavaScript projects.

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Advice on Yeoman, npm

StackShare
StackShare

Apr 23, 2019

Needs adviceonNode.jsNode.jsnpmnpmYarnYarn

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
Mark

CTO at Gemsotec bvba

Apr 25, 2019

ReviewonReactReactTypeScriptTypeScriptYarnYarn

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
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

Yeoman
Yeoman
npm
npm

Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of tools, libraries, and a workflow that can help developers quickly build beautiful, compelling web apps. It is comprised of yo - a scaffolding tool using our generator system, grunt - a task runner for your build process and bower for dependency management.

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.

Lightning-fast scaffolding — Easily scaffold new projects with customizable templates (e.g HTML5 Boilerplate, Bootstrap), RequireJS and more.;Great build process — Not only do you get minification and concatenation; I also optimize all your image files, HTML, compile your CoffeeScript and Compass files, if you're using AMD, I will pass those modules through r.js so you don't have to.;Automatically compile CoffeeScript & Compass — Our LiveReload watch process automatically compiles source files and refreshes your browser whenever a change is made so you don't have to.;Automatically lint your scripts — All your scripts are automatically run against JSHint to ensure they're following language best-practices.;Built-in preview server — No more having to fire up your own HTTP Server. My built-in one can be fired with just one command.;Awesome Image Optimization — I optimize all your images using OptiPNG and JPEGTran so your users can spend less time downloading assets and more time using your app.;Killer package management — Need a dependency? It's just a keystroke away. I allow you to easily search for new packages via the command-line (e.g. `bower search jquery`), install them and keep them updated without needing to open your browser.;PhantomJS Unit Testing — Easily run your unit tests in headless WebKit via PhantomJS. When you create a new application, I also include some test scaffolding for your app.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
10.1K
GitHub Stars
17.6K
GitHub Forks
730
GitHub Forks
3.0K
Stacks
1.7K
Stacks
137.4K
Followers
1.3K
Followers
82.2K
Votes
396
Votes
1.6K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 121
    Lightning-fast scaffolding
  • 83
    Automation
  • 78
    Great build process
  • 57
    Open source
  • 49
    Yo
Cons
  • 1
    Even harder to debug than Javascript
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
    Problems with lockfiles
  • 5
    Bad at package versioning and being deterministic
  • 3
    Node-gyp takes forever
  • 1
    Super slow
Integrations
Bower
Bower
Grunt
Grunt
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Yeoman, npm?

RequireJS

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

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

Yarn

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.

Component

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.

Verdaccio

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.

pip

pip

It is the package installer for Python. You can use pip to install packages from the Python Package Index and other indexes.

Duo

Duo

Duo is a next-generation package manager that blends the best ideas from Component, Browserify and Go to make organizing and writing front-end code quick and painless.

Lineman

Lineman

Lineman is a command-line utility that is hyper-focused on helping web developers build first-class JavaScript web applications. Lineman provides a thin wrapper around a number of client-side productivity tools (primarily Express, Grunt, and Testem), with the goal of helping developers focus on writing awesome web apps instead of worrying about workflow configuration.

Pika.dev

Pika.dev

It is a new kind of package registry for the modern web. It handles formatting, configuring, building and publishing every package on the registry, so that individual authors don't have to.

Bundler

Bundler

It provides a consistent environment for Ruby projects by tracking and installing the exact gems and versions that are needed. It is an exit from dependency hell, and ensures that the gems you need are present in development, staging, and production.

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