What is proto?
proto is a pluggable toolchain manager.
If you're unfamiliar with the concept of a toolchain, a toolchain is a collection of tools that are downloaded, installed, and managed by version through a single interface. In the context of proto's toolchain, a tool is either a programming language, or a dependency/package manager for a language, or a custom implementation provided by a plugin. It's the next step in the version manager evolution.
Why proto?
proto was designed to be a modern and holistic version manager for all of your favorite programming languages. We believe a single tool that works the same across every language is better than multiple ad-hoc tools. While we only support a handful of languages today, we aim to support many more in the future!
proto powers moon's toolchain, enabling a single source of truth for both tools!
Features
- Lightspeed! With Rust and WASM, we can guarantee exceptional performance.
- Multi-language. A single CLI for managing versions for all of your languages.
- Cross-platform, for a consistent experience across machines and teams.
- Contextual version detection, ensuring the correct version of a tool is always used.
- Checksum verification, ensuring a tool came from a trusted source.
- Detects and infers from a language's ecosystem for maximum compatibility.
- Pluggable architecture, allowing for custom tooling.
How does it work?
The toolchain is a .proto directory within the current user's home directory, e.g., ~/.proto.
The first step in a tool's life-cycle is being downloaded to ~/.proto/temp. Downloads are
typically an archive that can be unpacked into a target directory. Once downloaded, we verify the
downloaded file by running a checksum. If this check fails for any reason, the tool is unusable,
and the process is aborted.
After a successful verification, the last step in the tool's life-cycle can begin, installation.
Depending on the type of download, the installation process may differ. For archives, we unpack the
tool to ~/.proto/tools/<name>/<version>. In the future, we'll support building from source.
From here, we make these tools globally available by prepending ~/.proto/bin to PATH (typically
as part of your shell profile). Continue reading for more about this bin folder.
Shims
proto is powered the by industry standard concept of shims. For each tool installed in proto, a shim
file will exist at ~/.proto/bin/<tool>. Shims are not symlinks to the tool's binary, but are
thin wrappers around proto run, enabling
automatic version detection on every invocation!
The ~/.proto/bin directory should be in your PATH if proto was setup correctly. If not, run
the proto setup command, or add the path manually.
Supported tools
The following tools are officially supported in proto via moonrepo. Additional tools can be supported through third-party plugins.
+ npm, pnpm, yarn
Supported targets
Because proto is written in Rust, we only support targets that are explicitly compiled for, which are currently:
| Operating system | Architecture | Target |
|---|---|---|
| macOS 64-bit | Intel | x86_64-apple-darwin |
| macOS 64-bit | ARM | aarch64-apple-darwin |
| Linux 64-bit | Intel GNU | x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu |
| Windows 64-bit | Intel | x86_64-pc-windows-msvc |
Roadmap
- Linux ARM/musl support.
- Build from source for existing languages.
- New languages.