I maintain a set of templates and a starter project builder for fullstack projects: Goldstack. This project makes heavy use of Yarn 3 features, specifically for workspace management.
I realised that a new version of Yarn, Yarn 4 was released recently, so I wanted to explore if I can easily update this project from Yarn 3 to Yarn 4.
This project contains more than 70 workspaces (including sub-workspaces) and uses a number of frameworks and libraries, such as:
- TypeScript
- React
- AWS SDK
- Next.js
- ESLint
- and many more
So I think it can be a good testing ground for upgrading to Yarn 4.
I completed the upgrade and released this in version 0.5.0 of Goldstack.
Overall it took me around 3 hours to perform the upgrade. Here an overview of what I needed to do:
Updating Yarn
First, Yarn needed to be updated to version 4 using the following commands:
yarn set version stable
yarn install
Note that this may upgrade to a later version than Yarn 4 if you run this at a future point in time.
Upgrading Node version
Yarn 4 is not compatible with earlier versions of Node. Specifically Node 16 is no longer supported.
I needed to ensure that all GitHub actions provide an environment that runs in Node 18:
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-node@v2
with:
node-version: '18'
Fixing CLI commands
There was an incompatible change included in Yarn 4 with respect to the foreach command. Previously it was possible to run a command as follows:
yarn foreach run clean
However, now Yarn requires to add a qualifier. Specifically one of the following:
Command | Description |
---|---|
-A,--all |
Run the command on all workspaces of a project |
-R,--recursive |
Run the command on the current workspace and all of its recursive dependencies |
-W,--worktree |
Run the command on all workspaces of the current worktree |
I provided the -W
or --worktree
option for all occurrences where I previously used foreach
. I usually just wanted to run a command for all packages for a workspace - but not including recursive dependencies or all packages in the whole project (what -A
will do).
A worktree is defined in the Yarn documentation as:
[...] a worktree is the name given to workspaces that list their own child workspaces.
I would say overall it was a fairly easy process to upgrade to Yarn 4. Next from here I would like to explore:
- Yarn now supports having its binary managed through corepack. My template currently still uses
yarnPath
. - Yarn supports a hybrid mode that allows managing package dependencies using Yarn Plug'n'play and the 'node linker' (that requires the
node_modules
) folder alongside each other. I want to explore whether this can be used to create a mobile template based on Expo
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