How to install package from github repo in Yarn

Question

You can add any Git repository (or tarball) as a dependency to yarn by specifying the remote URL (either HTTPS or SSH):

yarn add <git remote url> installs a package from a remote git repository.
yarn add <git remote url>#<branch/commit/tag> installs a package from a remote git repository at specific git branch, git commit or git tag.
yarn add https://my-project.org/package.tgz installs a package from a remote gzipped tarball.

Here are some examples:

yarn add https://github.com/fancyapps/fancybox [remote url]
yarn add ssh://github.com/fancyapps/fancybox#3.0  [branch]
yarn add https://github.com/fancyapps/fancybox#5cda5b529ce3fb6c167a55d42ee5a316e921d95f [commit]

(Note: Fancybox v2.6.1 isn't available in the Git version.)

To support both npm and yarn, you can use the git+url syntax:

git+https://github.com/owner/package.git#commithashortagorbranch
git+ssh://github.com/owner/package.git#commithashortagorbranch

For ssh style urls just add ssh before the url:

yarn add ssh://<whatever>@<xxx>#<branch,tag,commit>

This is described here: https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/add#toc-adding-dependencies

For example:

yarn add https://github.com/novnc/noVNC.git#0613d18

For GitHub (or similar) private repository:

yarn add 'ssh://[email protected]:myproject.git#<branch,tag,commit>'
npm install 'ssh://[email protected]:myproject.git#<branch,tag,commit>'

Yarn 2

Installing from remote URLs has changed slightly with Yarn 2. Specifically, remote URLs must be prefixed with the package name. So for github this means:

yarn add '<package name>@https://github.com/<github user>/<github repo>'

Make sure that <package name> matches the value in the "name" field of the repo's package.json file.

To target a specific branch add either head=<branch> or commit=<full commit hash> via the URL fragment:

yarn add '<package name>@https://github.com/<github user>/<github repo>#head=<branch name>'

If you're trying to install an individual package from a Yarn monorepo on github you can add workspace=<package name> to the URL fragment:

yarn add '<package name>@https://github.com/<github user>/<github repo>#head=<branch name>&workspace=<package name>'

I use this short format for github repositories:

yarn add github_user/repository_name#commit_hash