Fiddling around with the wire webapp which is available on GitHub I came across yarn.

Yarn is a package manager like npm which accesses the same repositories.

The design goals are reproducibility of builds, speed and security.

Installation

npm install -g yarn

or on macOS

brew install yarn

yarn --version

A new yarn project can be started with “yarn init”.  After a couple of questions yarn creates a package.json file for you.

$ yarn init
yarn init v0.27.5
question name (yarn_test): yarn_test
question version (1.0.0): 1.0.0
question description: see how it works
question entry point (index.js): index.js
question repository url:
question author: jboegeholz
question license (MIT): MIT
success Saved package.json
Done in 35.38s.

Adding dependencies is easy as well:

 $ yarn add grunt
 yarn add v0.27.5
 info No lockfile found.
 [1/4] Resolving packages...
 [2/4] Fetching packages...
 [3/4] Linking dependencies...
 [4/4] Building fresh packages...
 success Saved lockfile.
 success Saved 89 new dependencies.

After adding the first dependency yarn downloads all sub-dependencies as well. On interesting fact is the creation of a lock file for dependency versions. That means If you check in the yarn.lock that you can reproduce your builds deterministically.

When you already a project setup you can easily install all dependencies with:

$ yarn install

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