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Volta

Jeff Gonzalez

A big challenge in working with lots of different projects is making sure your dev environment matches across your team and production.

Tools like Node and NPM, Yarn, etc. are installed globally on your machine. Normally, you can only have one version of Node and NPM installed, and with NPM with you install global packages, only one of them can be installed at a time.

I used (and fought with) tools like NVM (Node Version Manager) for quite a while until I discovered Volta. I think I heard about it originally from a tweet from Yehuda Katz See his experience here.

I've had great experience with Volta on multiple platforms (various Linux, Windows, MacOS).

One feature in particular that I like about it is the pin functionality. When you are in folder with a package.json file, Volta automatically looks for the volta entry in it and will switch to whatever toolchain the package requires.

To create the entry in your package.json, use the volta pin command, documented here.