How many Yarn scripts distributed via Homebrew ?
What is Yarn? 🔗
Yarn is a fast, secure, and reliable package manager for JavaScript dependencies. It was created by Facebook (now Meta) to address performance and consistency issues in the default Node.js package manager, npm.
Core Purpose and Function 🔗
Yarn is primarily used to manage project dependencies—the external libraries and packages your code relies on to function. It works by reading the package.json file in your project to identify which libraries need to be installed.
- Dependency Management: It automates the process of downloading, updating, and removing libraries.
- Registry Compatibility: Yarn retrieves packages from the same global npm registry as other managers, making it fully compatible with the vast ecosystem of existing JavaScript packages.
- Lockfile System: Yarn generates a
yarn.lockfile, which locks down the specific versions of every package installed. This ensures that every developer on a team installs the exact same file structure, eliminating “it works on my machine” bugs.
Key Features 🔗
Yarn introduced several optimizations that set it apart from early versions of npm, many of which have become industry standards.
- Offline Caching: Yarn caches every package it downloads. If you need to install a package you have used before, Yarn retrieves it from the local disk rather than redownloading it, allowing for offline work and faster installs.
- Parallel Downloads: Unlike older managers that downloaded files sequentially, Yarn maximizes resource utilization by installing multiple packages simultaneously.
- Plug’n’Play (PnP): Modern versions of Yarn (v2+) offer a feature called Plug’n’Play, which allows Node projects to run without the heavy
node_modulesfolder, improving startup time and optimizing disk space. - Workspaces: It has built-in support for “monorepos”, allowing developers to manage multiple project packages within a single repository efficiently.
Yarn vs. npm 🔗
While both tools perform the same fundamental task, they have distinct operational differences.
| Feature | Yarn | npm |
|---|---|---|
| Lock File | Generates yarn.lock for deterministic installs. | Generates package-lock.json. |
| Installation | Parallel installation (historically faster). | Serial installation (improved in recent versions). |
| Output Logs | Minimal, emoji-supported, clean logs. | often more verbose. |
| Security | Uses checksums to verify package integrity before execution. | Includes security audits (npm audit). |
Origins and Development 🔗
Yarn was released in 2016 as a collaboration between Facebook, Exponent (now Expo), Google, and Tilde. It was developed specifically to solve scalability and consistency problems Facebook faced with their massive codebases, which existing tools could not handle efficiently at the time.
Statistics of Yarn 🔗
On December 16th 2025, The number of CLI scripts depend on Yarn and distributed via Homebrew Core Formulae is 18 apps.
You may like to compare it with Bun, Node JS , and Deno .
Apps depending on yarn and distributed via Homebrew Core Formulae 🔗
- sapling : Source control client
- anchor : Solana Program Framework
- chronograf : Open source monitoring and visualization UI for the TICK stack
- grafana : Gorgeous metric visualizations and dashboards for timeseries databases
- grafana-alloy : OpenTelemetry Collector distribution with programmable pipelines
- nexus : Repository manager for binary software components
- openbao : Provides a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data
- phoneinfoga : Information gathering framework for phone numbers
- tilt : Define your dev environment as code. For microservice apps on Kubernetes
- argo : Get stuff done with container-native workflows for Kubernetes
- gitea : Painless self-hosted all-in-one software development service
- grafana-agent : Exporter for Prometheus Metrics, Loki Logs, and Tempo Traces
- imageoptim-cli : CLI for ImageOptim, ImageAlpha and JPEGmini
- opensearch-dashboards : Open source visualization dashboards for OpenSearch
- argocd : GitOps Continuous Delivery for Kubernetes
- carrot2 : Search results clustering engine
- gobackup : CLI tool for backup your databases, files to cloud storages
- prometheus : Service monitoring system and time series database
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