Biome is a Rust-based, unified toolchain for web projects that combines formatting, linting, and import sorting into a single tool, delivering 10-25x faster performance than ESLint + Prettier combined while maintaining 97% Prettier compatibility. Originally forked from Rome in 2023, Biome has become the production-ready successor, offering first-class LSP support, type-aware linting without TypeScript compiler dependency, and a growing plugin ecosystem powered by GritQL—making it especially valuable for teams seeking to simplify their development workflow and dramatically reduce CI/CD times in monorepos.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 20 focused tables and 128 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Installation Methods
Getting Biome into a project works through whichever package manager you already use — npm, pnpm, yarn, or bun — and the one piece of advice that applies across all of them is to pin an exact version, since Biome's output can shift between releases. There's also a standalone binary for CI or edge environments where Node isn't available, and biome init to scaffold a sensible biome.json to start from.
| Method | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
npm install --save-dev --save-exact /biome | • Install Biome as a project dev dependency • --save-exact recommended to avoid unexpected updates | |
pnpm add --save-dev --save-exact @biomejs/biome | • Fast, disk-efficient installation using hard links • preferred for monorepos | |
yarn add --dev --exact @biomejs/biome | • Install via Yarn Classic or Yarn Berry • --exact flag ensures version locking |