Last updated October 29, 2020

To our excitement, Yarn 2 was released in early 2020. The team has created a “zero downloads” package manager, which means users may use “vendor” directories to include their yarn binaries, dependencies, and development dependencies in their repositories. Learn more about Yarn’s new philosophy.

This article is intended to help current Heroku users migrate from Yarn 1 to Yarn 2. Apps being migrated should already be using Yarn 1 and are using the most up-to-date version of the Heroku Node.js buildpack. This article will not work for applications that install Yarn from other scripts, such as the Heroku Ruby buildpack. Heroku expects all dependencies to be included in the .yarn directory to take full advantage of “zero downloads”.

Heroku users using Yarn are not required to migrate to Yarn 2, and users will have access to Yarn 1 in their apps after it is deprecated. However, it’s advised to migrate to Yarn 2 to ensure the most up-to-date bug fixes and security patches in the package manager.

Use this article to migrate your app code locally to Yarn 2, as well your application on Heroku.

Local Setup

Prepare local environment

Enter the directory of the source code that needs the migration. The local commands will be run at the root of the project. Make sure the local yarn version is up to date. To update it locally, run install with npm:

npm install -g yarn

The version should be >= 1.22.4. Run yarn -v to confirm.

Move custom cache directories to workspaces

In package.json, change your cacheDirectories to workspaces. For example, if you have the following:

"cacheDirectories": [
  "client/node_modules"
]

Change it to the following, and specify that the project is private:

"workspaces": [
  "client"
],
"private": true,

There’s no need to specify the node_modules directory. Make sure the "name" key in the package.json of the subdirectory reflects the directory name and the workspace name specified in the root package.json.

Next, delete any node_modules folders and yarn.lock files in subdirectories, and go to your application directory and run yarn:

cd ~/path/to/project && yarn install

This should update the yarn.lock file of your directory to reflect the entire dependency tree specified by the workspaces. Confirm that the lock file has been updated by looking for a dependency that has been specified in a package.json of a subdirectory.

Make changes to source code

There are additional files that must be checked into git in order to use Yarn 2 on Heroku. Yarn subscribes to a “zero-download” philosophy. There will be additional download costs to checking into git more files and directories, but this will create faster builds on Heroku.

Use yarn to set the yarn version on the source code.

yarn set version berry

This will create a .yarnrc.yml file and a .yarn directory. Check both into git and make sure they are available to Heroku at build time. In the .yarn directory, there is a releases directory that contains a yarn-berry.js.

Next, install the dependencies from the package.json.

yarn install

The yarn.lock file will be modified. Check these changes into git.

Add the following to your .gitignore:

.yarn/*
!.yarn/cache
!.yarn/releases
!.yarn/plugins
!.yarn/sdks
!.yarn/versions

A pnp.js file is also generated - this is the “Plug N Play” file. Yarn uses it to access the packages. There are also additional directories that are generated in the .yarn directory, including a new directory cache where dependencies are installed. Check the tracked contents of .yarn into git.

Clear Heroku App cache

Since Heroku won’t be restoring the cache at the beginning of the build or storing it at the end of the build, you can go ahead and purge any build cache that is leftover from previous builds.

Make sure you have heroku-cli installed. Then, install the heroku-builds plugin.

heroku plugins:install heroku-builds

Next, run the command to clear the cache.

heroku builds:cache:purge --app $APP_NAME

After this, you’ll want to redeploy your app, but first finish up the next steps to ensure a successful deploy.

Update Heroku environment (with Plug'n'Play)

If you’re using Yarn 2, you have the option of using Yarn’s Plug'n'Play to reference dependencies, or you can continue to use node modules. Each requires a slightly different set up, so if you intend to use node modules, set up your app accordingly.

Disable dependency caching

Right now, Heroku doesn’t cache dependencies with Yarn 2 from the .yarn/cache directory. When using Plug'n'Play, Yarn will expect zipped up dependencies to be in the .yarn/cache directory. However, the buildpack will still run yarn install to ensure that postinstall scripts will be run for all dependencies.

You will want to remove the environment variables that are associated with Yarn 1 and node_modules. Therefore, remove the NODE_MODULES_CACHE environment variable. This variable should be set to false.

heroku config:set NODE_MODULES_CACHE=false

Remove production environment variables

When Yarn 2 installs packages at the top level, there is no longer a --production flag that can be used to only install dependencies without devDependencies. This means 2 things:

1. The buildpack will run an install on all dependencies in the initial yarn install step.
2. The buildpack will not be able to prune dependencies listed in devDependencies at the end of the build as Yarn 1 did.

In order to take advantage of --production flag and devDependencies management, you’ll have to use Yarn Workspaces. There’s more documentation here: https://yarnpkg.com/features/workspaces.

If you leave the production environment variables enabled with Yarn 2, the build will fail. Be sure to unset the environment variables:

heroku config:unset NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION YARN_PRODUCTION

Remove private registry environment variables

If you’ve set any tokens for accessing a private registry and you’re using Yarn 2 with a checked in cache, unset those as well. You may do something like this:

heroku config:unset PRIVATE_NPM_TOKEN

Update Heroku environment (for node modules)

As described above, you will either be using Plug'n'Play or node modules for dependencies. To use Plug'n'Play, you’ll want to follow the instructions above.

Set up Yarn configuration

If you’ve opted out of using PnP for dependencies, you’ll need to specify this in your .yarnrc.yml. Add the following:

nodeLinker: "node-modules"

Now you’re ready to use node modules with Yarn 2!

Dependency caching

If you’re using node modules, it’s up to you if you want to use the Heroku cache to store dependencies between builds. It’s advised to test which provides a more performant and secure build for your app.

If you are already caching dependencies, test your app with the cache turned off.

heroku config:set NODE_MODULES_CACHE=false

To reenable the cache, reset the NODE_MODULES_CACHE variable.

heroku config:set NODE_MODULES_CACHE=true

Remove production environment variables

As described here, the --production flag will cause the build to fail when using Yarn 2, so you will need to disable it.

heroku config:unset NPM_CONFIG_PRODUCTION YARN_PRODUCTION

Test your App

After you’ve made your changes, make sure to run your test suite on your app’s code. Once the tests have passed successfully, deploy your application to Heroku. Confirm that the build has been successful.

If you run into any issues, please open an Issue on GitHub.