X

Motivation

Nowadays we have a few options for package managers on the Frontend world. Some famous ones are npm, yarn and pnpm. Because of that, we worked on some projects that have yarn, other has pnpm, and other uses npm and it was always hard to follow which project uses what. Of course, you already passed through a situation where you were in a project that uses npm and then when you change to another project by accident you were always trying to add new dependencies using the npm CLI but the project uses yarn, and so on.

X is the command to try to solve this problem. Using x you can configure a .x-rc file with which command the project uses or let x determine which package manager to use based on the lockfile the project has.

Installation

To use x you just need to install it globally using one of the package managers (npm, pnpm or yarn):

npm:

npm install -g @matheusrocha89/x

yarn:

yarn global add @matheusrocha89/x

pnpm:

pnpm add -g @matheusrocha89/x

How to use

You can just run any command of the package manager of the project but replace the package manager name with x. For example:

Adding new dependency:

Npm:

npm install lodash

X:

x install lodash

It also accepts the flags of the package managers and forwards them to the command:

Npm installs as dev dependecy:

npm install -D lodash

X:

x install -D lodash

.x-rc

You can create a .x-rc in your project with the package manager that x should use.

For NPM:

echo "npm" >> .x-rc

For Yarn:

echo "yarn" >> .x-rc

For PNPM:

echo "pnpm" >> .x-rc