Using asdf to Manage Software Versions on Macos

After reading Thorsten Ball’s Register Spill newsletter about New Year, new job, new machine I decided to give asdf a try. It’s a single piece of software designed to manage multiple versions of any number of other pieces of software. Like rbenv or rvm is to Ruby, asdf is to Ruby, and Python, and NodeJS, and, and, and.

Here’s how I set it up.

Step One

Clone the GitHub repository. Installing it via Homebrew apparently has some issues. Running this command will close the 0.13.1 version into the .asdf directory in your $HOME.

 git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf --branch v0.13.1

Step Two

Install some plugins to manage the software of your choice. You can get a complete list of plugins available by running:

asdf plugin-list-all

I actually piped the output through grep to make finding the software I wanted a bit quicker.

asdf plugin-list-all | grep ruby

With the plugin name and repository information, run:

asdf plugin install ruby

Step Three

Determine the version, or versions, of the software you want.

asdf list all ruby

Step Four

Install the software.

asdf install ruby latest

or

asdf install ruby 3.3.0

Step Five

Set the version globally. (It can be overridden on a project by project basis.)

asdf global ruby latest

There is no Step Six.

Using asdf means I have one set of software version management commands to remember, and one location where that information, and those versions, are kept. Better still, the version information can be shared, say with your team, ensuring everyone has the same versions of required tools installed.