While setting up my new personal server, I needed node in order to run various scripts including Vercel.
Usually I reach for nvm or node version manager. nvm has been great for many years. On my Macs, I usually install nvm using brew even though it is discouraged and nvm offers no support for brew based installs. I also notice that oepning new iTerm 2 terminal windows has a long startup time, anywhere from 3 to 10 seconds. Recent reading reveals that slowdown could come from loading completions for various CLIs. One of those CLIs could be nvm.
Volta is a rust based node version manager tool that does just what nvm does, but since it’s rust based, it’s fast.
As far as I know, there’s no brew install option, but that’s fine.
One unusual quirk is that by default, if you use yarn, and it’s not installed some other way, Volta will offer installation. If you take it at face value, you might expect yarn@1 or yarn. Instead, surprisingly, Volta will install yarn berry or yarn@3. I am not sure if a yarn berry global installation can even handle yarn@1 repositories. Further ramifications are you can’t install globals with yarn@3 either. This quirk concludes with a quirk too: you can’t uninstall yarn@3 with Volta right now.
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