Simple and speedy package manager
Simple: Cotton works with web applications, including those built with React, Next.js, Vite, TypeScript, ESLint, and more.
Speedy: With a fast network, cotton install
runs faster than rm -rf node_modules
.
Trouble free: Ever run into errors when you forget to run yarn
? No more. With Cotton, node_modules
would never get out of sync.
Quickstart for Netlify • Cloudflare Pages
Tool | With lockfile and cache |
---|---|
Cotton | 0.272s |
Bun | 0.356s |
pnpm | 2.332s |
Yarn | 2.775s |
npm | 4.309s |
Installing packages used by create-react-app:
Tool | Initial install | With lockfile only | With lockfile and cache |
---|---|---|---|
Cotton | 4.0s | 1.8s | 0.3s |
pnpm | 24.3s | 17.9s | 5.5s |
Yarn | 31.9s | 27.0s | 10.6s |
npm | 35.4s | 21.3s | 13.0s |
See benchmark for more information.
cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/danielhuang/cotton
Download and install the compiled binary:
sudo curl -f#SL --compressed --tlsv1.2 https://api.cirrus-ci.com/v1/artifact/github/danielhuang/cotton/Build/binaries/target/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/release/cotton -o /usr/local/bin/cotton
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/cotton
cotton install
This will install packages to node_modules
and save cotton.lock
if needed.
To run the start
script:
cotton run start
To automatically restart the script when package.json
changes:
cotton run start --watch package.json
Unlike other package managers, Cotton does not require installing packages before running scripts. Missing packages will be installed on-demand automatically.
cotton update
This will load the latest available versions of dependencies (including transitive dependencies) and save registry information to cotton.lock
. Specified versions in package.json
are not modified.
If dependencies require install scripts (such as puppeteer
or electron
) to function, add this to cotton.toml
:
allow_install_scripts = true
In order to use Cotton, you have 2 options:
- Commit the binary to the repository, working similarly to committing Yarn 2+ (recommended)
- Download Cotton on-demand as part of the build process
If the binary is committed to the repository, use ./cotton
instead of cotton
.
First, modify the configuration in netlify.toml
, and add these lines:
[build.environment]
NPM_FLAGS="--version"
Make sure yarn.lock
is not present.
Add a command to remove node_modules
from the build directory after the build finishes. Since Netlify stores its cache using tar, caching and extracting node_modules
would be slower than reinstalling using Cotton.
For example, if the build command was
cotton run build
Add another command to the end:
cotton run build && mv node_modules _node_modules
This would disable Netlify's cache.
Set the environment variable NPM_FLAGS
to --version
. Make sure that there is no yarn.lock
in the repository.
- Cotton does not currently support Git repositories or local paths as dependencies; only registries and direct urls are supported.