setup

In the search for the perfect NodeJS version manager (again?)

Some time ago I shared how much I liked the way asdf simplified version management of some of the developer tools (mostly: programming languages) for me.

asdf is mature and offers a lot of ready to use plugins. It syntax is easy to remember and concise. But I newer actually used it for NodeJS version management. Why? Mainly it was due to the fact that I was pretty happy with nvm that I started using couple of years ago. nvm has unique ability to install new version of NodeJS reinstalling all packages (global ones) that are installed for the currently used version, the syntax is as follows:

nvm install <new_version> --reinstall-packages-from=<old_version>

That is super convenient, as it happens automatically, so after installing new version you end up with all the packages you need. Awesome.

nvm just doesn’t seem to work well under fish. For some strange reason I had to remember every time on setting default version, otherwise npm and all the globally installed packages were not seen as available. This was a bit of pain.
I have spent some time trying to find some solution for this issue, but nothing worked as I wanted. I tried some additional wrappers - but these affected either fish start performance or were not convenient for me to use.

My friend suggested me to try asdf for NodeJS - and I was all like ‘why haven’t I thought of it before’?

ASDF

Installing a new plugin for asdf is super simple:

asdf plugin-add nodejs

That’s it!

Installing a new version of NodeJS is not harder either:

asdf install nodejs <version>

So right after roughly a minute I had asdf supporting NodeJS versioning. The very last thing that I had to do was installing packages I usually need. I did that manually by creating a list of packages installed (using npm list -g --depth=0) and then passing package names to the npm i -g. And it was this moment that I realized some strange. It seem that installing packages took ages in comparison with nvm!

At first I thought this was just my impression, there were dozens of packages to install, each having some dependencies… I must have been wrong.
Just for the future convenience I have spent some time in the evening developing small script that would automate installing new version of NodeJS and installing global packages. It took me some time (as I wanted to have it polished). If you’re curious - you may find it in my dotfiles repository on my github (direct link: https://github.com/MaciekTalaska/dotfiles/blob/master/asdf_reinstall.sh).

I have installed another NodeJS version and run the script to test it (using time). The times I got were pretty horrible:

nametime
nvm2:41.76
asdf26:23.49

So I started reading about the issue, and it seems this is something that community behind asdf (or asdf-nodejs specifically) is very well aware of:

I have experimented with the SKIP_RESHIM=1 flag, that help a lot, but not as much as I hoped for, and the times were not even close to those I have experienced when using nvm.

nametime
nvm2:41.76
asdf26:23.49
asdf (SKIP_RESHIM=1)8:33.94

I knew, I felt there just “has to be a better way”…

I have tried some other version managers for NodeJS. I have re-evaluated nvm but experiencing the pain of setting default NodeJS version each time… no, it was not something I wanted to get back into.

And then at some point I have found… fnm!

FNM to the rescue!

So fnm stands for Fast Version Manager and it does what it says. It is fast. It is as fast as nvm. Its syntax is quite easy to get used to, but more importantly it works perfectly well under fish. The only problem I have encountered was that at first it didn’t seem to detect being run in fish environment. After looking at the code I have realized that it (fnm) relies on $SHELL variable to be set properly. For some reason I have had it set to the path to the shell I was using… after fixing that (just adding set -xg SHELL /usr/bin/fish to my config.fish) and reinstalling all went well.

The times using fnm are as follows:

nametime
nvm2:41.76
asdf26:23.49
asdf (SKIP_RESHIM=1)8:33.94
fnm2:44.22

So I was quite impressed with the performance. I was happy fnm works well under fish. Using it was not a hard task either. Interacting with fnm is pretty similar to nvm:

  • listing installed versions:

fnm ls

  • listing available versions:

fnm ls-remote

  • installing new version:

fnm install <version>

  • making installed version default version:

fnm alias <version> default

So the very last thing I needed was to change the script I have originally developed for asdf-nodejs so that it supports fnm. If you would like to have a look/use it, you could find it in the same repo: https://github.com/MaciekTalaska/dotfiles/blob/master/fnm_reinstall.sh

Conclusion

I am happy that I have found a perfect solution for myself. It did take me some time, but now this is a pure joy working again.

Go and check fnm there is a high change you may want to switch as well (especially if you’re fish user, or if you are using asdf currently and are not happy with how it performs).

setup