asdf, a must-have for every programmer

one runtime manager to rule them all

So what is asdf

Well is not a typo 😅.

asdf is a “one tool” able to manage all runtimes & tools a programmer has locally.
NodeJS, NPM, Java, mvn, gradle, go, rust, deno… if you know it then asdf has your back covered.

At this moment it has over 450 support for runtimes and tools in the form of plugins.

You can check it yourself on the repo page

So why should I use it?

Well is extremely easy to use.
Let’s say that you want to manage NodeJS runtimes.
First, you need to add the plugin to asdf with this command:

asdf plugin add nodejs https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-nodejs.git

This command will install the plugin on your machine.

You can visualize all the NodeJS versions that asdf has with this command

asdf list-all nodejs

Now install the version that you need, for example

asdf install nodejs 14.8.0

And now we need to set it to the local terminal

asdf local nodejs 14.8.0

or to global with this command:

asdf global nodejs 14.8.0

Then in the future, to change the NodeJS version just :

in the future just run one of those two commands:

asdf local nodejs 14.8.0

or

asdf global nodejs 14.8.0

For more information, you can check the tool repository documentation.

Let me know what you think. Is this just another clunky tool?

Thank you for reading and as always,
If you enjoyed please leave a few claps 👏👏👏
As it helps me a lot.

Have a lovely day.