When working on multiple JavaScript codebases at the same time, it's often necessary to use different versions of Node and other JavaScript tools. On developer machines, these tools are usually installed in the user account or the machine itself, which means a solution is needed to switch between multiple installations. For Node itself there's nvm, but we want to highlight Volta as an alternative that we're seeing in use with our teams. Volta has several advantages over using nvm: it can manage other JavaScript tools such as Yarn; it also has the notion of pinning a version of the toolchain on a project basis, which means that developers can simply use the tools in a given code directory without having to worry about manually switching between tool versions — Volta simply uses shims in the path to select the pinned version. Written in Rust, Volta is fast and ships as a single binary without dependencies.
