QUESTION: What is yarn and pnpm?

In the software development world, the constant search for faster and more efficient tools has led to the creation of alternatives to the standard package manager. Yarn is a popular alternative to npm from Facebook, originally created to solve issues with installation speed and dependency security by offering parallel downloading and strict version determinism through its own yarn.lock file. In turn, pnpm represents an even more innovative approach to dependency management, using hard links and symbolic links from a global storage at the operating system level, ensuring unprecedentedly efficient file storage and saving gigabytes of free disk space.

Both of these tools have earned the trust of developers because they work significantly faster and more reliably than traditional npm, especially in large monorepos or projects with hundreds of dependencies. To lock versions, they use their own lock files: yarn.lock for Yarn and pnpm-lock.yaml for pnpm, which perform the same function as package-lock.json, guaranteeing an identical environment for all team members. At the same time, all these alternative managers are fully compatible with the npm registry, meaning you can download, use, and publish any packages from the official public JavaScript repository without any issues, simply by switching to using the new command for installing dependencies in your project.