Switching the package manager from yarn to npm

We recently migrated a Rails application from yarn to npm. We decided to go this step instead of upgrading to > Yarn 2.0 to reduce the number of dependencies in our project.

Migration

• Remove the yarn.lock file
• Remove the node_modules folder
• Run npm install
• Replace all occurrences of yarn with npm in your project

Notes

• With npm vendored packages with dependencies create their own node_modules folder within the vendor path. We fixed this by replacing the vendored packages and removing them.
• It might be useful to keep the same package versions. You can try https://github.com/imsnif/synp Show archive.org snapshot or change the version constraint in your package.json to the fixed version used in your yarn.lock (after the first npm install you can relax the constraints again).
• jsbundling-rails Show archive.org snapshot supports NPM since v1.2.2.
• geordi Show archive.org snapshot supports package managers other than yarn since v11.1.0.