Publishing a package is the act of making it available for others to install. In Yarn Berry, the command is yarn npm publish. It packs the active workspace into a tarball and uploads it to a registry. The critical difference from Yarn Classic is the command name: Classic used yarn publish, Berry uses yarn npm…
An npm account is the credential that separates a consumer of packages from a publisher. Creating one takes minutes, but the account that can actually publish is a different thing from the account that was just created. Publishing to the public registry requires two gates to be cleared: email verification and two-factor authentication . The…
A CI pipeline that installs dependencies without immutable installs is a pipeline that lies. It resolves new versions silently, rewrites the lockfile if needed, and produces a build that may not match what developers tested locally. Yarn Berry changes this default: when it detects a CI environment, it automatically enables immutable installs. A lockfile that…
A published package is consumed by many different resolvers: Node.js in CommonJS mode, Node.js in ESM mode, TypeScript with legacy module resolution, TypeScript with modern bundler or node16 resolution, and bundlers like Vite and Webpack. Each resolver looks at package.json differently. The four fields that determine whether a package works across all of them are…
Migrating from npm to Yarn is not a single command. It is a sequence of decisions: which Yarn version to target, whether to use Plug’n’Play or node_modules, how to convert the lockfile, and how to reconfigure the settings that npm stored in .npmrc. The most common mistake is running yarn install on an npm project…
Publishing a package to the npm registry involves a decision that is easy to get wrong: which files from the project directory end up in the published tarball. Three mechanisms compete for this decision—.gitignore, .npmignore, and the files field in package.json—and their precedence rules are not intuitive. A .gitignore entry that excludes a secrets file…
1. Toolchain & Corepack 2. Project Initialization 3. Dependency Management 4. Installation & Lockfile 5. Running Scripts & Binaries 6. Workspaces (Monorepos) 7. Configuration (.yarnrc.yml) 8. Plug’n’Play (PnP) 9. Zero-Installs 10. Patching Dependencies 11. Publishing Packages 12. Cache & Registry Management 13. Environment Variables 14. CI/CD GitHub Actions (Standard) 15. npm to Yarn Migration
Version management is the discipline of incrementing a package’s version number in a way that communicates the nature of the change to the consumers who depend on it. The npm version command automates this increment, writing the new version to package.json and package-lock.json, and—when run inside a Git repository—creating a commit and a tag that…
Publishing a package to the npm registry is a single command, but the result depends on a decision made before the command runs: is the package scoped or unscoped, and is the account paid or free? The npm publish command reads the package name in package.json and applies a default access level based on whether…
Distribution tags (dist-tags) are human-readable labels that point to specific versions of a published package. The latest tag is the one npm uses by default when a consumer runs npm install package-name without a version or tag specifier. Every other tag—next, beta, stable, canary—is a custom pointer that the publisher creates and manages. The npm…