Using asdf to manage my development tools

Today I was reminded again of the tool asdf which can manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool. I have been a long-time user of Sdkman for managing my JVM related tool chain (JDK, Kotlin, Gradle, etc), but then I use Homebrew for managing Nodejs, Python, Poetry.

I don't like that this approach as it is not cross-platform (by which I mean Linux and MacOS), and uses a combination of tools - asdf and homebrew.

So I have decided to try out asdf in anger. It's quite easy to get started following the documentation, but the main things to annoy me are:

• By default it does not respect existing files like .nvmrc when picking a version of a tool. You need to add legacy_version_file = yes to the file ~.asdfrc to enable this behaviour.

• When installing a new tool, it does not immediately register it as the global default. For example, installing gradle requires two commands: asdf install gradle latest and asdf global gradle latest.

• It does not handle JDK distributions as well as sdkman, which is hardly a surprise. The support for upgrading multiple versions (11 and 17) is clunky.

So I have written the following script that works around these limitations, and can be used to boostrap and update my asdf installation. Sharing in case it's useful for others.

#!/usr/bin/env zsh # # Updates my asdf install. Very basic for now. # # Fail quickly set -e # Ensure sensible configuration file rcfile=~/.asdfrc echo Checking $rcfile... test -f $rcfile || touch $rcfile if [[ $(grep -c legacy_version_file $rcfile) = 0 ]]; then echo ...adding 'legacy_version_file = yes' echo 'legacy_version_file = yes' >> $rcfile fi # Update installed plugins echo Updating installed plugins... asdf plugin-update --all > /dev/null # Ensure all the plugins are installed echo Checking plugins are installed... for n in java kotlin gradle python poetry nodejs; do if asdf plugin-list | grep -cq $n; then true # Already installed else echo ...installing $n echo asdf plugin-add $n fi done echo Updating versions... # Special Java logic asdf install java latest:temurin-11 asdf install java latest:corretto-17 asdf global java latest:corretto-17 # Special Nodejs logic asdf install nodejs lts asdf global nodejs lts # The nice ones for n in gradle kotlin python poetry; do asdf install $n latest asdf global $n latest done echo ...done echo ------------- echo 'Need to run `asdf uninstall <tool> <old-version>` as necessary' 

This blogpost was originally posted at https://puppycrawl.com/blog/2023/01/12/asdf.html.