Although there are existing solutions like nvm, n, nodenv and potentially more, all these solutions focus on installing nodejs globally and making it available in the shell environment. In contrast what node-simple-downloader does is simply downloading and extracting the desired Node.js version to a specified directory. How the downloaded Node.js version is then used is totally up to the user.

The use-case that triggered the creation of this tool is that all our nodejs applications specify themselves which version of Node.js they need. This allows app developers to take care of maintaining the local Node.js installation without involvement of system operators.

Are there more details on how the above mentioned setup looks like?

Not yet. We are currently only planing on migrating away from researchgate/nodejs-installer and haven't finalized how it will work in the end. Once this is done we will share more details.

Okay, but why golang?

I always wanted to learn go and the scope of this tool seemed doable for someone who hasn't worked with go before. So bear in mind that the code is probably not structured and written in the best way possible. If you have suggestions feel free to open PRs. I'm happy to learn how it can be done better.

The other decision to go with go is that having a single executable without a requirement for a runtime, interpreter or package manager should make the setup easier in the end.

Usage

With specific version

nsd download /path/ --version 12.15.0

With specific version from file

nsd download /path/ --from-file ./node_version

No specific version, will try reading from CWD/.nvmrc

nsd download /path/

How to build

Requires go version 1.15 or newer

Checkout project
Run go mod tidy
Run cd nsd && go build

How to run tests

cd nsd && go test ./...

# Packages

nsd

No description provided by the author