[AIRFLOW-6272] Switch from npm to yarnpkg for managing front-end dependencies

[ashb]

Make sure you have checked all steps below.

Jira

• https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AIRFLOW-6272.
• Yarn is BSD licensed.

Description

It is:

• quicker to install
• easier to get repeatable results
• Takes up less space (130MB/15k files vs 190MB/23k files)
• nicer to user (has better help)

[ashb]

No real reason we have to switch, I just find yarn nicer to use

[potiuk]

Just a question - if we are going to change - why don't we change to pnpm instead. It seems it's relatively new but stable/recommended package managers for node. And I like the output of it even more than yarn's. Also it shares downloaded packages via symbolic/hard links to .pnpm directory thus saving space.

It also has saner (than npm) commands (similar to yarn):

pnpm install --frozen-lockfile

rather than

npm ci

It is also quite significantly faster. I installed all packages for airflow with npm, pnpm and yarn I got (with cache removed):

time pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
...
real	1m10.994s
user	0m11.005s
sys	0m19.809s

du -s -h node_modules/
146M	node_modules/

time yarn install --frozen-lockfile
...
real	2m47.795s
user	0m12.539s
sys	0m16.754s

du -s -h node_modules/
178M	node_modules/

I could not check npm in the same way (as the latest npm fails installing our packages on my mac currently. But I think the savings are significant pnpm vs. yarn.

[potiuk]

Also it seems pnpm has a nicer way of handling accidentally installed packages: https://medium.com/pnpm/pnpms-strictness-helps-to-avoid-silly-bugs-9a15fb306308

[ashb]

We could, I'll check it out - my first thing though is that pnpm is mostly the work of one person, where as yarn is backed by facebook. Don't know if that is an issue or not.

[ashb]

Actually one reason I think to use yarn over pnpm -- yarn will detect and resolve conflicts in the lock file, and from what I can see pnpm won't.

[potiuk]

Yeah. I have no strong preference here - I usually do not touch those parts. But the arguments with community and conflict resolution are valid. There is this issue still unresolved about conflict resolution in pnpm pnpm/pnpm#2036. And since we are going to do some UI revamp shortly, conflicts might happen more frequently (they are not a problem now when we do not work on UI actively.

I am happy to rely on your choice and use yarn.

[ashb]

We have more experience with Yarn so let's stick with that.

[potiuk]

Fine with me :)

[codecov-io]

Codecov Report

Merging #6844 into master will increase coverage by 0.06%.
The diff coverage is n/a.

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master    #6844      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   84.49%   84.56%   +0.06%     
==========================================
  Files         680      680              
  Lines       38392    38451      +59     
==========================================
+ Hits        32441    32517      +76     
+ Misses       5951     5934      -17

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
airflow/hooks/presto_hook.py	75.92% <0%> (-1.63%)	⬇️
...low/contrib/operators/datastore_import_operator.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
airflow/gcp/example_dags/example_datastore.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
airflow/gcp/example_dags/example_dataflow.py	93.33% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
airflow/contrib/operators/dataflow_operator.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
...low/contrib/operators/datastore_export_operator.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
airflow/contrib/hooks/gcp_text_to_speech_hook.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
airflow/gcp/example_dags/example_bigquery_dts.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
airflow/contrib/sensors/bigquery_sensor.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
...w/contrib/operators/gcp_text_to_speech_operator.py	100% <0%> (ø)	⬆️
... and 12 more

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[potiuk]

One small change to the documentation.