To upgrade:

bun upgrade

bun install

Today is an exciting day. Introducing bun install – an incredibly fast npm client.

Before I get into perf numbers, consider this especially early.

• workspaces not implemented yet
• link: not implemented yet
• github: not implemented yet
• git: not implemented yet
• Config file where you can set registry and auth tokens is not implemented yet. That means private packages won't really work yet (though it does read $npm_config_registry)
• The lockfile format may change a little in the coming weeks (which would invalidate existing lockfiles)
• postinstall will not be supported (probably won't be opt-in either). esbuild and turbo get special treatment I'm calling "native bin linking". I plan to write a more generalizable proposal for this that other npm clients can adopt to make shipping binary executables on npm faster & simpler
• node-gyp isn't supported yet either, but that will be fixed.

Linux

100x faster npm install for incremental installs. In this case, only react is missing (the cleanup resets node_modules), each package manager has an up-to-date lockfile, and packages have previously downloaded before (disk cache)

20x faster than npm install when node_modules is empty. In this case, each package manager has an up-to-date lockfile and packages have also been downloaded before.

When there are no changes, bun install is 100x faster than npm install

macOS

Note: currently macOS installs are single-threaded & parallelism may help when there are > 100 packages, so these numbers may improve later

80x faster npm install for incremental installs.

4x faster npm install when there is no node_modules folder

When there are no changes, 80x faster than npm install

Autocomplete

Thanks to @evanwashere, bun add has autocomplete for the top 10,000 npm packages. It also searches your shell's history to complete from.

Fish completions:

Why is it faster?

I will do a longer write up on why it's faster. Zig is part of that, but a lot of work went into data layout, the lockfile format, the https client, the manifest cache format, and a lot of other stuff.