Switching from NVM to Volta

The problem

Developers using WSL as their established environment have no issue switching between Node versions using nvm, whereas this operation requires admin rights for Windows users running outside of WSL.

Obtaining admin rights can be a bit of a slow process and is much too slow for something as simple as switching Node versions. Could Volta provide a cross-platform solution that is more straightforward to manage compared to nvm?

Why switch?

• Faster than NVM.
• Runs using a shim instead of symlinks so doesn’t require admin rights for Windows users.
• Can manage Node dependencies in package.json instead of having to have a dedicated .nvmrc file.
• Automatically switches Node versions when cd‘ing between projects, functionality that required a custom script with nvm.

How to switch

Run these commands in your root directory:

rm -rf ~/.nvm rm -rf ~/.npm rm -rf ~/.bower

Remove source ~/.nvm from your .bashrc or .zshrc, along with any other references to nvm.

Volta installation

For Mac/Unix systems, run curl https://get.volta.sh | bash or for Windows run winget install Volta.Volta. More detailed information can be found in the documentation.

To globally install a LTS Node version, run volta install node in your root directory, or to install a specific version, run like so volta install node@22.5.1.

Pinning dependencies

If you want to manage a specific Node version within a project, cd into your project folder and run volta pin node@20.16 at the root level of the project, replacing the version number with your own.

"volta": {
  "node": "20.16.0"
}

You’ll see that this will create the above entry in your package.json which can then be commited to source control. When any other developers with Volta installed pull down this repository and access it via the command line, it will automatically switch their Node version to the one specified.

Testing the auto-switch

Now cd into another project and run volta pin node@<new-version-number>.

Run node -v and see the new version number listed. Now cd back into your other project with a pinned Node version in the package.json and run node -v again.

You should see the version number updated automatically without any custom script or configuration!

Moving forward

Volta seems like a great tool to manage Node versions in a more consistent way across teams with different development environments, less manual intervention and nice fancy features included out-of-the-box.