Autoenv VS asdf

the way I manage (2) is with a kind of DIY pipenv system i've come up with. i have a tool installed in my terminal called autoenv. when i navigate to a new directory, if there's a .env file in it, autoenv executes it. that's basically all autoenv does. I have a .env in my home folder that, among other things, activates my "master" venv. when I create a new project that I want to have its own venv, I just add a .env file to that folder to activate it. otherwise, the master venv is active whenever I roam around my filesystem, functionally serving as a default environment i reuse.

Inspired by autoenv, pyautoenv hooks into the cd command in your shell and will automatically activate a poetry or venv Python environment if that environment is defined in the directory you're cd-ing into. Zsh, Bash, and PowerShell are supported.

There is an autoenv tool you can use to automatically activate a python virtualenv when you cd into a directory but it’s a little annoying to set up https://github.com/hyperupcall/autoenv

But IMO the best solution by far is to use autoenv. There is autoenv for bash and autoenv for zsh.

Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

https://asdf-vm.com/

Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).

(asdf)[https://asdf-vm.com/] fully supports Python and almost any other language. I've been using it for Ruby, Python, Elixir, and other languages for years and never looked back.

Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).

There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:

I've really been enjoying asdf, which is a program that allows you to install specified versions of dev utilities as well as dynamically manage them via shims and .tool-versions files.

I use the asdf version manager.

You might check out rtx[1]

Its an asdf[2] rewrite, in rust, that can do most of the things nvm can

[1] https://github.com/jdx/rtx

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