yarn tag

Add, remove, or list tags on a package.

What are tags?

Distribution tags (or dist-tags) are a way of marking published versions of your package with a label. Users of your package can install it using this label instead of a version number.

For example, if you had a stable release channel and a canary release channel, you could use tags as a way to allow the user to type:

yarn add your-package-name@stable
yarn add your-package-name@canary

Different tags have different meanings:

  • latest: The current version of the package
  • stable: The latest stable release of the package, normally the same as latest unless you have Long-term Support (LTS)
  • beta: A release before becoming latest and/or stable, used to share upcoming changes before they are finished.
  • canary: A “nightly” or pre-beta release, if your project is frequently updated and depended on by many people you may use this to share even earlier code.
  • dev: Sometimes you want to be able to test out a single revision through the registry while you’re still working on things, this is useful for that.

Some projects will make up their own tags as they see appropriate or in place of one of the more standard ones. Such as next which is used the same as beta.

Although these are widely considered the “standard” tags, the only one that has any real meaning is latest which is used for determining which version to install when no version is specified.

Caveats

You cannot use tags that match potential version numbers since they share a namespace:

yarn add your-package-name@<version>
yarn add your-package-name@<tag>

Any tag that can also be used as a valid semver range will be rejected. For example, you cannot have a tag named v2.3 because in semver it means >=2.3.0 <2.4.0.

In general, avoid using tags that look like versions, they typically only confuse people anyways.

Commands

yarn tag add <package>@<version> <tag>

Add a tag named <tag> for a specific <version> of a <package>.

yarn tag remove <package> <tag>

Remove a tag named <tag> from a <package> that is no longer in use.

Note: You do not need to delete a tag before moving it to another version in the package. It’s better not to.

yarn tag list [<package>]

List all of the tags for a <package>. If unspecified <package> will default to the package you’re currently inside the directory of.

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