A very useful tool for managing Node versions

I'm very particular about matching the version of tools I use locally with what is used in production.

This includes specific versions of nginx, PHP, MySQL, and Node.

And I work with a variety of different client projects, so I need to be able to set these versions per project.

For almost everything, we use Docker, but we found it to be painfully slow for Node and building front-end assets.

For a while, I used nvm as a tool for managing multiple Node versions, but I would frequently bump into weird issues which would take an annoying amount of time to troubleshoot.

About a year ago, I learned about Volta, and I cautiously gave it a try.

I'm happy to report that I haven't had any of the issues I bumped into with nvm, and it has been a delight to use. It just gets out of the way and makes it frictionless to pin specific versions of Node and npm per project.

If you've felt this pain before, I recommend giving Volta a try.

Here to help,

Joel

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