Use in PowerShell for Linux?

[rashil2000]

Hi! It's really nice to see a version manager that works consistently across OSes. However, the main reason I'm unable to use nvm.sh is because I use PowerShell everywhere.

So I would like to know how I can source the nvs.sh so that I can use nvs in PowerShell on Linux.

[jasongin]

At the time I originally developed nvs, PowerShell was Windows-only. I haven't investigated what it would take to support PowerShell on Linux now, but I'm guessing sourcing nvs.sh is not going to work, at least not fully. Probably a better approach would be to update the nvs.ps1 script to be cross-platform.

I probably won't have time to work on this anytime soon, but I'd be happy to review a PR if someone else wants to pick it up.

[rashil2000]

Is there a way for me to create a binary or a script for nvs (like nvs.exe for Windows) so that I can put it in /usr/bin and call it anywhere on Linux?

[rashil2000]

There are tools like pkg and nexe which can package Nodejs apps into standalone binaries, I wonder if it's possible to make use of those.

[jasongin]

Using a separate binary won’t work, for the same reason invoking nvs.sh from powershell doesn’t work: a separate process cannot modify the PATH environment variable in the current shell. That is why nvs requires separate integration scripts for each kind of shell. The part of nvs that modifies the PATH works by sourcing a shell script in-proc from the calling shell.

[rashil2000]

Oh, I see. Thanks for the info!

[rashil2000]

I have beginner PowerShell knowledge, but looking at nvs.ps1 file, I think we only need to change the node binary's URL (for platforms other than Windows) and subsequent extraction command (7zr.exe). Is this correct?

[jasongin]

@rashil2000 That sounds right. And you might also need to change the detection of processor arch, as I don't know whether there is a PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE env variable on non-Windows platforms.

[rashil2000]

[System.Environment]::Is64BitOperatingSystem gives us the answer for that

[jasongin]

That's not enough if you're on an arm cpu.

[rashil2000]

For such cases, we can simply fallback to using uname -m | sed -e 's/x86_64/x64/;s/i86pc/x64/;s/i686/x86/;s/aarch64/arm64/', as these commands will always be available on any *nix system

[rashil2000]

Hi, sorry for not getting back on this.

I'm wondering if there's a much simpler way to achieve this: for Linux/macOS systems, the nvs.ps1 script can call the script nvs (since it has a shebang it will work), simply as a one-time step to download the bootstrap binary and extract it. We would not need to rewrite all the tar extraction logic. Something like this:

if (-not (Test-Path $bootstrapNodePath)) {
  if (-not ($IsWindows -or $PSVersionTable.PSVersion.Major -eq 5)) {    
    & "$scriptDir/nvs" install
  } else {
  ...
}

Afterwards the nvs.ps1 script can directly be used in Linux PowerShell sessions (some tiny path modifications might be needed in the script still).

If this is okay, I can try sending a PR for this.

[jasongin]

Yes, that's reasonable. As you said, there may still be some additional details to work out.

[rashil2000]

I have sent a PR, it's a very minimal change - #207

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04.