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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

I've been using it since 2017 for an Elixir/Phoenix backend, React frontend and PostgreSQL database. It works very well and spares me from having to use three language managers (one for Elixir, one for Erlang and one for JS) plus a docker container for PostgreSQL. I was pleasantly surprised that it manages the database too.

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My install of asdf at some point broke so badly, I could not get anything to run. I wish I remembered the exact trouble, but it was bad enough that I just un-installed it in favor of `nvm` for node versioning, and never looked back.

n is still the simplest node version manager I've come across [0]. Maybe worth checking out if you're looking for an alternative.

I also use the companion n-install [1] utility to get setup very quickly.

[0] https://github.com/tj/n

[1] https://github.com/mklement0/n-install

Mind elaborating on how it manages the database? That sounds useful! Does it install and run the db for you or something?

It manages the version of the database that you run. https://github.com/smashedtoatoms/asdf-postgres

I'm assuming the author was referring to this plugin: https://github.com/smashedtoatoms/asdf-postgres

Sibling answers link to the plugin with the details.

The general idea is that it installs the binaries and the data into a subdirectory of ~/.asdf, then sets PATH and the other environment variables to point to there. Then pg_ctl start starts the database.

Each project has its own .tool_versions file so you can have different versions of the same database running in parallel. I was doing that with docker containers but this is easier.

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