Correct way to use yarn/npm from node script

Question

Inside my script I want to use some functionality from yarn/npm

Like get results of yarn info packageName. I could spawn command and get output, but I believe there should be more correct way to do that.

Can't find any documentation about usage of yarn as package. Any ideas?

Answer 1

NPM and Yarn were designed as CLI tools. It's possible to load them with require but since executable script does a lot of work on options processing, this isn't practical.

The most straightforward and predictable way is to run them with child_process spawn or exec. There are npm-programmatic and yarn-programmatic third-party packages that do this internally. Since their APIs don't necessarily cover 100% of CLI functionality, it may still be beneficial to run commands directly.

There are open issues for NPM and Yarn regarding programmatic use.