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proto v0.8 - Version detection and installation improvements

· 2 min read
Miles Johnson
Miles Johnson
Founder, developer

In this release, we're dropping some quality of life workflow improvements.

Built-in detection for proto use​

The proto use command is extremely useful for bootstrapping your development environment with all necessary tooling, but it had a hard requirement on the .prototools configuration file. But what if you're already using non-proto version files, like .nvmrc or .dvmrc? Or maybe manifest settings, like packageManager or engines in package.json?

Great questions, and we agree! As such, we've updated proto use to also detect a version from the environment for the current working directory. We suggest using .prototools, but feel free to configure your environments as you so choose!

# Install all the things!
$ proto use

Smarter version detection​

One of proto's best features is its contextual version detection, but it did have 1 shortcoming. When we detected a partial version, like 1.2, we'd resolve to a fully qualified version with the latest patch version (e.g. 1.2.3). While this worked in most cases, everytime a new patch was released upstream (e.g. 1.2.4), proto would error and require a manual install of this new version. This was pretty annoying as 1.2.3 and 1.2.4 are likely to be compatible, and both satisfy the 1.2 version constraint.

To mitigate this scenario, we've updated the version detection to scan the locally installed versions first when encountering a partial version. This solves the problem above by allowing 1.2.3 to satisfy the requirement, instead of forcing an install of 1.2.4.

Other changes​

View the official release for a full list of changes.