How to prevent yourself from running npm in a yarn project or the other way around?

Between my employment and hobby coding, I work on many JavaScript projects on a regular basis. Some of them use npm as the package manager, some yarn. Depending on which project I touched most recently, my muscle memory causes me to type the wrong command after switching projects.

Typing npm install when you meant yarn install can waste you a lot of time if you only notice it after all of the packages have been installed.

To stop myself from making this mistake, I created a small script. It wraps the npm and yarn commands in a check - it prevents me from running an npm command if there’s a yarn.lock file in the directory, and it prevents me from running the yarn command if there’s a package-lock.json file in the directory.

To use it, add this to your shell’s start-up script (e.g. .zshrc):

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npm() {
  if [ -f yarn.lock ]; then
    echo 'use yarn';
  else
    command npm $*;
  fi
}

yarn() {
  if [ -f package-lock.json ]; then
    echo 'use npm';
  else
    command yarn $*;
  fi
}

If you ever need to run npm or yarn bypassing this check, you can do so by prepending command to the command.

Note that I have no experience with other package managers for JavaScript and I have no idea how my solution would interact with them.