The size & scope of NPM’s module library is unprecedented, and it is without a doubt one of JavaScript’s biggest advantages compared with other programming languages. The better you become at taking advantage of npm modules, the faster and more productive you’ll be as a developer.
Towards that end, I wanted to share some useful tips that’ve made a huge difference in my workflow while developing Node and frontend JavaScript projects.
There are several ways of searching the npm registry, but I’ve found Yarn’s search to consistently yield the most relevant and highest quality results.
Image Credit: Yarn
It turns out that Yarn’s search is powered by Algolia, an enterprise-grade hosted search solution used by many legit, tech-savvy companies such as Stripe, Twitch, and Medium. Here’s a quick preview of the search experience if you’ve never used the service before:
Yarn search — blazing fast, relevant results, and clean UX.
Simply put, this is awesome. Algolia is providing best-in-class, hosted search for Yarn’s website for free, and the entire community of JavaScript developers gets to take advantage of it.
The only downside is that a lot of JS developers aren’t aware of just how much better Yarn’s search is over alternatives, such as the default npm search.
An interesting alternative search solution is npms.io, whose open source architecture is backed by CouchDB and Elasticsearch. It takes into account a variety of interesting and very ambitious metrics for each package. The search relevancy empirically feels roughly on par with Yarn’s Algolia-powered search, and the additional metrics don’t really make a noticeable difference.
The speed, consistency, and overall user experience of Yarn’s search is, however, where Algolia’s expertise really shines. It’s simply a pleasure to use yarnpkg.com’s search, and the UX for such a complicated and repetitive process as searching for npm modules is more important than you may think.
It’s also worth mentioning some other contenders:
As a side note, I am in no way affiliated with Yarn or Algolia. I just love the JS community and want to get the word out about yarn’s search so more developers start taking advantage of it.
If I’m looking for a React or React Native solution, I generally start by searching the manually curated collection at JS.coach. Its authors have compiled a large, up-to-date list of quality, categorized modules for React, React Native, React VR, Webpack, Babel, and PostCSS.