Yarn is intended to be used with Yarn Switch, a tool that lets you use different Yarn versions depending on the project you’re in.

curl -sS https://repo.yarnpkg.com/install | bash

Caution

You will likely have to restart your terminal sessions, IDEs included, for the changes to take effect.

Once Yarn Switch is ready, if you wish to start a new project, running yarn init is all that’s needed. If you instead prefer to migrate an existing project, run the following command:

yarn switch zpm set version zpm

It intructs Yarn Switch to download the latest version of Yarn on its zpm release branch and run the yarn set version zpm command with it. This command will in turn update packageManager with the appropriate version.

Updating Yarn

Any time you’ll want to update Yarn to the latest version, just run:

yarn set version latest

Yarn will then configure your project to use the most recent stable binary.

Alternative installs

Corepack

While Corepack doesn’t support installing different binaries depending on the platform, we provide a compatibility setting under the form of YARNSW_COREPACK_COMPAT which, when set, will instruct Corepack to install Yarn Switch and transparently forward Yarn CLI commands to it.

While not recommended for a local setup, this compatibility layer can unlock you if you work in environments where dependencies are installed with Corepack before you even have a chance to run your own code, such as Netlify runners.

GitHub Actions

We provide a yarnpkg/setup-action repository that runs the standard installation flow on GitHub Actions:

jobs:
  my-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Setup Yarn
        uses: yarnpkg/setup-action@main

Self-managed binaries

Our release tarballs all provide two binaries:

• yarn is the Yarn Switch binary, which adds support for reading the packageManager field.

• yarn-bin is the “true” binary, containing all commands such as yarn install, yarn add, etc.

You can bypass Yarn Switch by extracting the yarn-bin binary somewhere into your $PATH and renaming it into yarn.