asdf-nodejs

Node.js plugin for asdf version manager

Install

After installing asdf, install the plugin by running:

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

Use

Check asdf readme for instructions on how to install & manage versions of Node.js at a system and project level.

Behind the scenes, asdf-nodejs utilizes node-build to install pre-compiled binaries and compile from source if necessary. You can check its README for more compile settings and troubleshooting.

When compiling a version from source, you are going to need to install all requirements for compiling Node.js (be advised that different versions might require different configurations). That being said, node-build does a great job at handling edge cases and compilations rarely need a deep investigation.

Configuration

Aside from the common configuration with node-build, asdf-nodejs has a few extra environment variables for configuration.

• ASDF_NODEJS_NODEBUILD_HOME: Home for the node-build installation, defaults to $ASDF_DIR/plugins/nodejs/.node-build, you can install it in another place or share it with your system
• ASDF_NODEJS_NODEBUILD: Path to the node-build executable, defaults to $NODE_BUILD_MIRROR_URL/bin/node-build
• ASDF_NODEJS_CONCURRENCY: How many jobs should be used in compilation. Defaults to half the computer cores
• ASDF_NODEJS_VERBOSE_INSTALL: Enables verbose output for downloading and building. Any value different from empty is treated as enabled.
• NODEJS_ORG_MIRROR: (Legacy) overrides the default mirror used for downloading the distibutions, alternative to the NODE_BUILD_MIRROR_URL node-build env var

Integrity/signature check

In the past asdf-nodejs checked for signatures and integrity on our own. node-build checks integrity by precomputing checksums ahead of time and versioning them together with the instructions for building them.

.nvmrc and .node-version support

asdf uses the .tool-versions for auto-switching between software versions. To ease migration, you can have it read an existing .nvmrc or .node-version file to find out what version of Node.js should be used. To do this, add the following to $HOME/.asdfrc:

legacy_version_file = yes

Updating node-build defitions

Every new node version needs to have a definition file in the node-build repository. Because of that, asdf-nodejs tries to update the local node-build repository at every install command to download definitions for newly added versions.

We provide a command for manually updating node-build at your own time:

asdf nodejs update-nodebuild

node-build advanced variations

node-build has some additional variations aside from the versions listed in asdf list-all nodejs (chakracore/graalvm branches and some others). As of now, we weakly support these variations because they are available for install and can be used in a .tool-versions file, but we don't list them as installation candidates nor give full support. Some of them will work out of the box, and some others will need a bit of investigation to get them built. We are planning in providing better support for these variations in the future.

To list all the available variations run:

asdf nodejs nodebuild --definitions

Note that this command only lists the current node-build definitions. You might want to update the local node-build repository before listing them.

Default npm Packages

asdf-nodejs can automatically install a set of default set of npm package right after installing a Node.js version. To enable this feature, provide a $HOME/.default-npm-packages file that lists one package per line, for example:

lodash
request
express

You can specify a non-default location of this file by setting a ASDF_NPM_DEFAULT_PACKAGES_FILE variable.