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proto v0.23 - New detection strategy, tool commands, and more

· 3 min read
Miles Johnson
Miles Johnson
Founder, developer

With this release, we've reorganized our commands, improved version detection, and Windows support.

New detect-strategy setting​

Up until now, when proto would attempt to detect a version, it would use a version from the closest .prototools file, or tool specific file (package.json, .nvmrc, etc), which ever matched first. For the most part, this works great, but what if you wanted .prototools to take precedence over other files, even if found in a higher parent directory? You unfortunately couldn't.

To support this new flow, we're introducing a new ~/.proto/config.toml setting called detect-strategy. This setting supports the following values, with more possibly in the future!

  • first-available (default) - Will use the first available version that is found. Either from .prototools or a tool specific file.
  • prefer-prototools - Prefer a .prototools version, even if found in a parent directory. If none found, falls back to tool specific file.
~/.proto/config.toml
detect-strategy = "prefer-prototools"

New proto tool command group (breaking)​

Our CLI surface area has been growing and we felt it was time to start grouping commands, starting with the new proto tool command. This command will contain "not used very often" subcommands in relation to tools and their plugins, primarily for managing plugins, and viewing tool information and inventory. As such, we've deprecated and moved the following top-level commands:

  • Moved proto add-plugin to proto tool add.
  • Moved proto remove-plugin to proto tool remove.
  • Moved proto plugins to proto tool list-plugins.
  • Moved proto tools to proto tool list.

New proto tool info command​

Continuing with the changes above, we're also introducing a new command, proto tool info, which displays detailed information about a tool and its backing plugin. For example:

$ proto tool info node

node - Node.js

Inventory
  Store: ~/.proto/tools/node
  Executable: ~/.proto/tools/node/20.0.0/bin/node
  Globals directory: ~/.proto/tools/node/globals/bin
  Binaries:
    - ~/.proto/bin/node (primary)
  Shims:
    - ~/.proto/shims/node (primary)

Plugin
  Version: 0.5.2
  Source: https://github.com/moonrepo/node-plugin/releases/download/v0.5.2/node_plugin.wasm

This command also supports JSON output via --json.

Other changes​

View the official release for a full list of changes.

  • Added support to plugins to ignore certain paths when detecting a version.
  • Updated Windows to create 3 shim files for each tool: .cmd (cmd.exe), .ps1 (powershell), and no extension (bash).