I am now in charge of an app whose dependencies were installed using yarn. I am more familiar with NPM. Is switching over as easy as deleting the yarn.lock file and installing NPM to the project? The app hasn't been updated in a year or two so I'm trying to update everything.
Or maybe a better question is, can I install both NPM and yarn globally but pick and choose which one I use for what app? Will it cause issues if they are both installed globally on machine?
Thanks in advance
You can definitely have Yarn and NPM installed on the same machine without issue. NPM generally comes packaged with Node, so most people using Yarn will also have NPM installed, wether they use it or not.
In terms of switching a project from Yarn to NPM, it's a pretty straightforward process, like you described: remove yarn.lock and remove the existing node_modules directory just to avoid any issues.
The subtle issue here is that the yarn.lock will be the current source of truth for exactly which versions of each dependency (and sub-dependencies) is installed. So by removing the yarn.lock your package.json will now become the (incomplete) source of truth which will likely result in some dependencies being upgraded when you perform your first npm install -- then your package-lock.json will become the new strict source of truth.
Given you're planning on updating everything anyway, then this likely isn't going to be an issue, but it's worth keeping in mind as you're likely to see some minor dependency changes.
