force-package-manager 🚔📦

npm | yarn-classic | yarn-berry | pnpm | bun ... never mix package managers again!

A Command Line Tool to avoid that different team members use different package managers by accident, and therefor mess up your repository.

Note: this tool clearly distinguishes between yarn version 1 ('classic') vs. yarn version 2+ ('berry').

Usage

Just add a preinstall script to your package.json file, like so:

{
  "scripts": {
    "preinstall": "npx -l -y force-package-manager -p npm"
  }
}

A more detailed example with some options:

{
  "scripts": {
    "preinstall": "npx -l -y force-package-manager -p npm -r '7.x.x' -o mute -c"
  }
}

The variant above additionally restricts the version range for npm to 7.x.x, only prints minimal output due to -o mute and cleans up unwanted lockfiles in case of errors due to -c.

How does it work

Quick summary

The script works in 3 steps:

1. Tries to find the wanted package manager
2. Tries to find the currently running package manager
3. Compares them

Detailed

Let us look at more details about the individual steps:

1. Tries to find the wanted package manager
   1. Checks if the wanted package manager is defined via the -p / --pmname option
   2. If not, it checks if the package manager is defined via the packageManager property in the package.json file. This is done with the identify-package-manager package.
   3. If not, it checks if the project has already been installed and therefore a lockfile, which can tell us the wanted package manager as well. This is also done with the identify-package-manager package.
2. Tries to find the currently running package manager
   1. This is done with the which-pm-runs package.
3. Compares them
   1. First it compares if the package manager itself matches
   2. If yes, it also checks if the desired version range is satisfied (via the semver package).

Clean up step

In case an error occurs the script also allows to try and clean up any created lockfiles automatically, at the end.

Imagine the following scenario:

Your wanted package manager is yarn-classic and someone runs npm install accidentally. The force-package-manager script will detect the mismatch, however it cannot prevent npm from creating its package-lock.json lockfile. Due to this, we added a clean-up step via the --clean / -c option, which will automatically try and remove all lockfiles that do not belong to the wanted package manager.

Options / Arguments

| option | short option | description | allowed values | default value | example | |-------------|--------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------| ------------- | ------- | | --version | -v | Display this package's version number | - | - | - | | --help | -h | Display this package's help + usage info | - | - | - | | --pmname | -p | Defines which package manager is wanted | npm, yarn-classic, yarn-berry, pnpm, bun | - | npm | | --pmrange | -r | Defines a restricting version range for the wanted package manager | Any valid semver range | - | "> 4" | | --clean | -c | Activates the clean-up step at the end of the script, in case of errors (see above) | - | - | | | --output | -o | Defines how many messages are being printed during the process. Use mute if you do not want to see any information except for negative script results. | mute, normal, verbose | normal | mute |