Node.js plugin for rtx version manager

After installing rtx, install the plugin by running:

rtx plugin install nodejs

Check rtx readme for instructions on how to install & manage versions of Node.js at a system and project level.

Behind the scenes, rtx-nodejs utilizes node-build to install pre-compiled binaries and compile from source if necessary. You can check its README for additional settings and some troubleshooting.

When compiling a version from source, you are going to need to install all requirements for compiling Node.js (be advised that different versions might require different configurations). That being said, node-build does a great job at handling edge cases and compilations rarely need a deep investigation.

node-build already has a handful of settings, in additional to that rtx-nodejs has a few extra configuration variables:

• RTX_NODEJS_VERBOSE_INSTALL: Enables verbose output for downloading and building. Any value different from empty is treated as enabled.
• RTX_NODEJS_FORCE_COMPILE: Forces compilation from source instead of preferring pre-compiled binaries
• RTX_NODEJS_NODEBUILD_HOME: Home for the node-build installation, defaults to $RTX_DATA_DIR/plugins/nodejs/.node-build, you can install it in another place or share it with your system
• RTX_NODEJS_NODEBUILD: Path to the node-build executable, defaults to $RTX_NODEJS_NODEBUILD_HOME/bin/node-build
• RTX_NODEJS_CONCURRENCY: How many jobs should be used in compilation. Defaults to half the computer cores
• NODEJS_ORG_MIRROR: (Legacy) overrides the default mirror used for downloading the distibutions, alternative to the NODE_BUILD_MIRROR_URL node-build env var

In the past rtx-nodejs checked for signatures and integrity by querying live keyservers. node-build, on the other hand, checks integrity by precomputing checksums ahead of time and versioning them together with the instructions for building them, making the process a lot more streamlined.

rtx uses a .tool-versions file for auto-switching between software versions. To ease migration, you can have it read an existing .nvmrc or .node-version file to find out what version of Node.js should be used.

We provide a command for running the installed node-build command:

rtx nodejs nodebuild --version

node-build has some additional variations aside from the versions listed in rtx ls-remote nodejs (chakracore/graalvm branches and some others). As of now, we weakly support these variations. In the sense that they are available for install and can be used in a .tool-versions file, but we don't list them as installation candidates nor give them full attention.

Some of them will work out of the box, and some will need a bit of investigation to get them built. We are planning in providing better support for these variations in the future.

To list all the available variations run:

rtx nodejs nodebuild --definitions

Note that this command only lists the current node-build definitions. You might want to update the local node-build repository before listing them.

Every new node version needs to have a definition file in the node-build repository. rtx-nodejs already tries to update node-build on every new version installation, but if you want to update node-build manually for some reason we provide a command just for that:

rtx nodejs update-nodebuild

rtx-nodejs can automatically install a set of default set of npm package right after installing a Node.js version. To enable this feature, provide a $HOME/.default-npm-packages file that lists one package per line, for example:

lodash
request
express

You can specify a non-default location of this file by setting a RTX_NPM_DEFAULT_PACKAGES_FILE variable.