How do I use Yarn 3.5 on Github Actions? (Error: cannot find module …/yarn-3.5.0.cjs)

On our local machines, we’ve installed the latest version of Yarn for our node version of 16.17 per the instructions on the Yarn website:

corepack enable

corepack prepare yarn@stable --activate

We found this step was necessary to make it work locally as well:

corepack prepare yarn@<version> --activate

We use Github actions to do things like lint and test our code. Here’s the lint.yml file:

name: Lint

on:
  # Trigger the workflow on push or pull request,
  # but only for the main branch
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  run-linters:
    name: Run linters
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Check out Git repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Use Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: "16.17"

      - name: Install Node.js dependencies
        run: yarn install --immutable --immutable-cache --check-cache

      - name: Run eslint
        run: yarn eslint src/ --max-warnings=0

      - name: Run Prettier
        run: yarn prettier src/ --check

According to the Github Actions docs, yarn should be installed in this CI environment:

GitHub-hosted runners have npm and Yarn dependency managers installed. You can use npm and Yarn to install dependencies in your workflow before building and testing your code.

However I believe the Yarn version Github actions uses is 1.something, as it seems to be the one installed when yarn is installed with npm install -g yarn, the old method of installing Yarn.

As such, we get the following error when Github actions tries to use yarn:

output from github CI

node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:959
  throw err;
  ^

Error: Cannot find module '/home/runner/work/ui/ui/.yarn/releases/yarn-3.5.0.cjs'
    at Function.Module._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:956:15)
    at Function.Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:804:27)
    at Function.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain] (node:internal/modules/run_main:81:12)
    at node:internal/main/run_main_module:17:47 {
  code: 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND',
  requireStack: []

I’ve tried various methods recommended online for telling Github which version of node and yarn to use. For example, I’ve added packageManager property to our package.json:

package.json

...
  "packageManager": "[email protected]",
...

That didn’t work, so I added engines property to package.json:

package.json

...
"engines": {
    "yarn": ">=3.5.0"
}

The error remained the same, so I tried directly installing and activating the latest version of yarn in the github actions .yml file:

lint.yml

name: Lint

on:
  # Trigger the workflow on push or pull request,
  # but only for the main branch
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  run-linters:
    name: Run linters
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Check out Git repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Use Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: "16.17"

      - name: Install latest Yarn
        run: corepack prepare yarn@stable --activate

      - name: Activate latest Yarn
        run: yarn set version stable

      - name: Install Node.js dependencies
        run: yarn install --immutable --immutable-cache --check-cache

      - name: Run eslint
        run: yarn eslint src/ --max-warnings=0

      - name: Run Prettier
        run: yarn prettier src/ --check

I can’t be entirely certain this error is because of a failure to use yarn v3.x, but that’s my suspicion as this whole setup worked with our yarn.lock was in the yarn v1.x format and we all used yarn v1.x locally. It’s only with the upgrade that it fails to work on github actions.

How can I instruct Github Actions’ runner to find / use the latest version of Yarn?

Additional Info:

.yarnrc.yml

nodeLinker: node-modules

yarnPath: .yarn/releases/yarn-3.5.0.cjs