Learn to build, bundle, and manage JavaScript/TypeScript applications using Bun’s native toolkit through step-by-step tutorials on ultra-fast installations, runtime APIs, script running, and project setup.
Bun is not a package manager in the traditional sense. It is a complete JavaScript and TypeScript toolkit delivered as a single executable, combining a runtime, a package manager, a bundler, and a test runner into one cohesive tool . The package manager is one component of this toolkit, but it is inseparable from the…
Bun is distributed as a single, dependency-free executable. There is no runtime environment to configure, no virtual machine to install, and no package manager to bootstrap. The installation is one command, and the resulting binary contains everything: the runtime, the package manager, the bundler, and the test runner. Managing versions is equally direct: bun upgrade…
Bun’s project initialization is designed to eliminate the configuration burden that Node.js projects typically carry. Running bun init generates a complete, working project with sensible defaults, and it integrates with package.json in ways that differ from npm and Yarn: it writes a typecheck script, it understands workspaces natively, and it defaults to treating package scripts…
Bun’s package manager is defined by its lockfile strategy. For its first two years, Bun used a binary lockfile named bun.lockb, which was faster to parse but opaque to review, Git diffs, and merge tools. In December 2024, Bun introduced a text-based alternative (bun.lock), and since Bun v1.2, it has become the default. This chapter…
Package management in Bun follows the familiar add, remove, and update pattern, but the execution engine underneath is fundamentally different. Because Bun is a native binary with a global install cache and a highly optimized resolver, the same commands that take seconds in npm or minutes in Yarn complete in milliseconds. This chapter covers the…