Monday morning started off with an intent to upgrade Yarn. I did something I’ve done many times before; copy/pasted a command that came whizzing by on Slack. It was a chained command with words I had a sense of familiarity about, but no real understanding of what would actually do. I had to ask where to run it, because I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to upgrade Yarn.

It wasn’t immediately obvious if the upgrade was successful or not. There was some output to suggest it wasn’t. Then I did something I haven’t done before, at least with problems like these… I decided to throw a lot of effort into learning more before asking for help. Of course, I do figure stuff out on my own all the time, but it tends to be for solving problems in the vicinity of what I already know. This was not. But I convinced myself it was a good opportunity to practice some learning grit, and to feel uncomfortable for not understanding — but trying anyway.

brew update && brew upgrade node yarn didn’t work because:

  • Yarn had originally been installed with npm 🙃
  • The command also gave me a git issue with a patch that failed to merge (which upon closer inspection had a commit date correlating to my 2nd week at work two years ago when the machine was brand new and probably when Homebrew was first installed, ahem…)
  • And it was really confusing that the HOMEBREW_REPOSITORY migrated to /usr/local/Homebrew which was why I couldn’t at first even find the directory that borked.

I got some help figuring all that 👆 out. But the really cool thing is that because I spent basically two half workdays reading up on my own first, we could start in a completely different spot when I eventually did ask for help. I now know a serious fuckload more that I did 36 hours ago:

Homebrew

  • a command starting with brew refers to Homebrew 🍺
  • which is a package manager for installing software on my operating system
  • stuff like node and git can be installed with brew
  • but unlike npm, it’s not used for handling packages in a repo

npm

  • on the other hand, is a package manager specifically for JavaScript 📦
  • npm is both a client and a registry
  • and we use it for two different types of packages:
    • local dependencies in a repo
    • but also those that are globally installed on my machine

Yarn

  • is an alternative npm client released last year 🌱
  • that installs the same packages from the same registry as npm
  • and just like npm, we use it for:
    • local packages so everyone working on a project has the same setup
    • but it can also install packages globally on my machine

package.json

  • handles dependencies in Node.js modules for the npm registry
  • but it’s also used to do the same in other projects
  • a project can use one client (either npm or Yarn) to handle npm packages in that project
  • the client is defined in the project, so a developer working on it will not use a different client that the next developer
  • but the package.json file looks the same regardless of client npm or Yarn

Managing my package managers and global packages

  • While a package.json file handles local project modules, I should take more responsibility for knowing what is installed on my machine: both the package managers and the packages that are installed globally. And perhaps even… updating it all once in a while… 🙈
  • brew update will update the Homebrew package manager itself
  • while brew upgrade will upgrade the packages I’ve installed with brew
  • brew pin <formula> can stop something from being changed
  • postgresql and mysql are now pinned to current versions on my machine, so I don’t upgrade any databases before there’s a specific need to do so
  • which means I can safely update and upgrade now that I know brew is a thing I have on my machine and what it does ✨
  • I have now uninstalled Yarn with npm. And I’ve instead used brew as that is now the primary suggested way of installing Yarn. 👌

Puh.

That adventure was both really uncomfortable and in the end very awesome.