During this weekend I wanted to try the new package manager Facebook created: Yarn, one of it’s bigger claims is to be faster than normal npm, although it uses the same package repositories as npm. this is done, as far as I know, using improvements in transfer the files along with a local package cache, so you don’t have to go always to npm to restore a package you already restored previously for other project.
As locally it was everything working smoothly, I decided create a new build task for VSTS so I can use it in my builds. First point it is only based to be used with your own agents for several reasons: first it has a demand which requires yarn to be installed (hosted agents does not have it … yet …), second, as said previously it uses a local cache to be faster, so at this moment, it made no sense to me to prepare something to be used with hosted agents, remember hosted agents are created on-the-fly so unless you need to restore packages for several projects per build (next scenario I will try to cover), Yarn will be not necessary (well I agree it also improves download speed, but …).
So, for this first version, I just looked at the code of the current npm task and modified it to use Yarn, it is pretty simple and straightforward. The code is in my github account: https://github.com/lfraile/YarnTask
Feel free to see it, modify it, play with it and install it, I will be reviewing it for some improvements.
PD: Just as I was writing this post, I noticed something I should have look before … There is already a Yarn task in the Marketplace, hehehe, as I mention in my talk about creating custom tasks: always look if there is something available before build it … so well .. my fault … but, still, I will continue trying to improve it.