The local tooling problem

I always had issues with managing the versions of the tools I use on my computer. Working on multiple projects, open and private sources implies that some tools are not all stuck on the same version. So I often end up needing to support multiple versions of the same tool on my computer. For example, I usually need to support multiple versions of languages : Go, Python, Java, NodeJS to name a few, but also tools like Terraform, Ansible, MySQL, Postgres ...

So I started to use different tools to handler this:

• GVM for Go
• Pyenv for Python
• SDKMAN for Java
• NVM for NodeJS
• Tfenv for Terraform
• ...

And everything worked fine, but everytime I had to use a new language or tool (recently done some Rust for instance), I had to find yet another tool. And I had to remember to update them from time to time.

Introducing ASDF

That when I found ASDF: "The Multiple Runtime Version Manager". As the name implies it's a tool to allow you to manage multiple versions of your runtimes with one tool.

So I gave it a go, and I was not disappointed. After installing it using brew install asdf, I was able to install the plugins that I needed, they are all listed in specific GitHub repository. You can run a single command to install a plugin and then you can install specific runtime version pretty easily:

asdf plugin add golang
asdf golang install 1.21.1

And boom I have a new version of Go installed on my computer.

Using ASDF in your projects

After you have access to a new version of a runtime, you need to be able to use it in your projects. With tools like nvm, you could define a specific .nvmrc file in your project to specify the version of NodeJS to use. ASDF has a similar feature, you can create a .tool-versions file in your project and specify the version of the runtime to use: asdf local golang 1.21.1 for instance will be responsible to populate the .tool-versions file with the correct version of Go. No more need to create multiple file named differently for each tool as everything is centralized in one file.

Easy migration

Adopting a new tool can be challenging in a team, but ASDF makes it easy. Indeed, most of the plugins support the non asdf version of the version definition. For instance for Go, you can use the go.mod file to specify the version of Go to use and ASDF will use it to install the correct version. .nvmrc is also supported for NodeJS for instance and so on.

That means that you can start using ASDF in your project without forcing your team to install it 🤩

Conclusion

ASDF is now one of the first thing I install on a new computer, it's so easy to switch tool version that I can't live without it anymore. I encourage you to give it a go, and if you have any question, feel free to ask them in the comments.

Flo.