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proto v0.34 - New detection strategy, status command, and outdated improvements

· 3 min read
Miles Johnson
Miles Johnson
Founder, developer

In this release, we've focused on the developer experience for common workflows.

New only-prototools detection strategy​

proto currently detects versions at runtime using 1 of 2 strategies, first-available which checks .prototools files and tool-specific files (like package.json engines), whichever is first, or prefer-prototools which works like the previous strategy, but prefers .prototools (even in a parent directory).

In this release, we're adding a 3rd strategy called only-prototools. This strategy will only check .prototools files and will not check tool-specific files. This is useful if you want explicit versions, and to avoid unexpected versions from random configs/directories.

.prototools
[settings]
detect-strategy = "only-prototools"

For the v1 release, we plan to make this strategy the new default.

New proto status command​

Sometimes you simply want to know what tools are currently active for a target directory, what versions those tools are resolved to, and the configuration file in which they are defined. To satisfy this requirement, we've added a new proto status command, which outputs something like the following:

$ proto status

Tool  Configured  Resolved  Installed                   Config
deno  1.40.0      1.40.0    ~/.proto/tools/deno/1.40.0  ~/.prototools
node  20.8.0      20.8.0    ~/.proto/tools/node/20.8.0  ~/.prototools
npm   10.1.0      10.1.0    ~/.proto/tools/npm/10.1.0   ~/.prototools

By default this includes tools from all .prototools files up the hierarchy, excluding ~/.proto/.prototools. To include global tools as well, pass --include-global.

Improved proto outdated experience​

The proto outdated command has worked "alright" but its developer experience wasn't the best. The terminal output was rudimentary, and writing updated versions to .prototools would save to the current directory, instead of the directory they are configured in.

To improve the overall developer experience, we've made the following changes to this command:

  • Displays all tools and available updates as a table of data.
  • Includes both newest (matching range) and latest versions available.
  • Includes the config file that the tool + version was loaded from.
  • When --update is passed, will now prompt to confirm the update.
  • When updating versions, versions are now written to their original config file, instead of local.
  • Updated the --latest flag to use the latest version when updating, instead of newest.
$ proto outdated

Tool  Current  Newest   Latest  Config
deno  1.40.0   1.42.4   1.42.4  ~/.prototools
node  20.8.0   20.12.2  21.7.3  ~/.prototools
npm   10.1.0   10.5.2   10.5.2  ~/.prototools

What about v0.32 and v0.33?​

You may have noticed that we don't have blog posts for either of these versions. The v0.32 release was a relatively light release with no meaningful changes, so we opted to not write a blog post for it. As for v0.33, we ran into build issues while releasing it, so we decided to skip it and move on to v0.34.

Other changes​

View the official release for a full list of changes.

  • Added a dist-url setting to some plugins, allowing the distribution download URL to be customized.
  • Updated proto setup (which is ran during proto installation) to modify the PATH system environment variable on Windows. To disable this functionality, pass --no-modify-path.