Managing dependencies

When you want to add, upgrade, or remove dependencies there are a couple of different commands you need to know.

Each command will automatically update your package.json and yarn.lock files.

If you want to use another package, you first need to add it as a dependency. In order to do that you should run:

yarn add [package]

This will automatically add the [package] to your dependencies in your package.json. It will also update your yarn.lock to reflect the change.

  {
    "name": "my-package",
    "dependencies": {
+     "package-1": "^1.0.0"
    }
  }

You can also add other types of dependencies using flags:

You can specify which version of a package you want to install by specifying either a dependency version or a tag.

yarn add [package]@[version]
yarn add [package]@[tag]

The [version] or [tag] will be what gets added to your package.json and then resolved against when installing the dependency.

For example:

yarn add package-1@1.2.3
yarn add package-2@^1.0.0
yarn add package-3@beta

{
  "dependencies": {
    "package-1": "1.2.3",
    "package-2": "^1.0.0",
    "package-3": "beta"
  }
}

yarn upgrade [package]
yarn upgrade [package]@[version]
yarn upgrade [package]@[tag]

This will upgrade your package.json and your yarn.lock file.

  {
    "name": "my-package",
    "dependencies": {
-     "package-1": "^1.0.0"
+     "package-1": "^2.0.0"
    }
  }

yarn remove [package]

This will update your package.json and your yarn.lock file.

Additional Reading