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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Can I still just install NVM and use that to install and maintain Node? I assume snap will suffer the same annoyances of apt where I can't trivially get the exact version I want and switch among them.

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If you don’t like NVM’s shell config shenanigans you can use n - https://github.com/tj/n

There'a also `nodenv` which I've taken to using recently. Doesn't slow down opening new shells like nvm. And has a handy feature that will set the used node version to whatever is found in a directory's `.node-version` file.

You can also just wrap the nvm commands in a function. I have it named `n`, so before doing any node/npm stuff in a shell, I run `n` then `node ....` whatever I wanted. Simple and doesn't slow down opening new shells.

    function n() {
      export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
      [ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"
      [ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion"
    }

Found it to be a ok workaround for the issue. Otherwise I'm just on nvm just because it continues to work and hasn't gotten in my way, since like 2013 or something. If someone is in the same boat but wanna fix the "slow new shell" thing, this is a quick fix for it.

Would love to hear what the "shell config shenanigans" wayneftw talked about, haven't hit that myself.

And `pyenv` [1], for Python.

I came into `nodenv` after being a regular user of `pyenv` for a while. Started with `nvm`, but wished for something more pyenv-like.

There is also `asdf` [2], which seems even more generic. On paper it looks interesting, but I haven't found a solid reason to switch out of `pyenv` and `nodenv`.

Has anyone tried `pyenv` and/or `nodenv` and switched to `asdf`?

[1] https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv [2] https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf

Yes. That’s what I did. I’m an ops engineer supporting multiple dev teams who are on varying versions of Node, nvm is all I can use.

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