Poor Man's ASDF for Windows.

This tool aims to be a way of managing multiple versions of standalone and (later) portable applications for windows.

Current Status

A very early stage. It's starting to be usable (in an alpha quality and features way 🙂). You can manually place standalone binaries in a specific path (see usage below), generate shims and configure global, local and custom version using tools.

Installation (Windows only)

Once the archive is downloaded and extracted, cd into the directory using powershell terminal and run (alternatively right-click the install.ps1 file and select Run with PowerShell):

# Optionally use -Debug to see exactly what the script is doing
.\install.ps1

This will create (if required) a few directories under $HOME/.asdfw and copy/update the executables. Nothing is modified outside of $HOME/.asdfw.

Once it completes you can optionally install the powershell module (highly recommended) - it includes temporary helpers until they are implemented in asdfw.exe:

• Get your module path: $env:PSModulePath
• Copy the ASDFHelpers directory into one of the directories in the module path (preferably in your $HOME). This should be enough to enable the provided helpers.
• If you want basic tab-completion, add the following to your powershell initialization script: asdfw.exe completion | Out-String | Invoke-Expression.

Finally, as a one-time step (You only need to perform this on first install) you need to add the $HOME\.asdfw\shims and $HOME\.asdfw\bin directories to your path. This is best done using system properties. It might require you to logout, restart shell, etc...

Usage

The idea behind this utility is to be able to install multiple versions of the same CLI application and configure the version to use globally, per directory or using environment variable. This is achieved by installing all the tools in specific hierarchy and using shims to launch the configured version of the application. Note that only standalone executables (and later specific portable applications) are supported.

The following features are currently supported:

• Only supports *.exe executables, Currently no other types are supported (more types will be added shortly).
• Manually install / uninstall stand alone binaries (see installations).
• Create shims for all installed applications/versions.
• Configure Local / Global / Ad Hoc version for each tool.
• Query the full path of the configured tool / version for current directory.
• Basic tab completion.
• Descriptive errors.

All operations are performed using either asdfw.exe or using one of the Powershell helpers (if installed). To get help on asdfw.exe run asdfw.exe --help. For help on the various powershell helpers run Get-Help <Command>.

Install New Tool/Version

Currently tool installation is manual. All executables has to installed under $HOME/.asdfw/installs/<TOOLNAME>/<VERSION>/bin. The provided powershell module contains a helper to create this hierarchy. If you installed it you can run:

New-ASDFInstallDir <TOOLNAME> <VERSION>

This will create the correct hierarchy and print instructions to the screen. Don't forget to run asdfw reshim after each tool you install. You might also want to configure the global version (see below).

Uninstall Tools

To uninstall tool you can delete either the specific version folder (e.g. $HOME\.asdfw\installs\<TOOL>\<VERSION>). To delete all versions of the tool just delete the tool directory.

Creating Shims

After each new tool you install you should run:

asdfw reshim

You can optionally add --cleanup flag to delete invalid shims (e.g. if you deleted the tool).

Configure Versions

There are three types of variables:

Global Version

This is the default version to use when calling the tool. You should always define global version:

asdfw.exe global <TOOL> <VERSION>

Directory Local Version

This is the version to use when running the tool inside a specific directory (no matter how deep inside this directory you are when you call the tool):

asdfw.exe local <TOOL> <VERSION>

Current Shell Version

Sometimes you want to temporarily try a different version. For that you need to define an environment variable in the form of ASDFW_<TOOL_UPPER_CASE>_VERSION. So in order to temporarily use hugo version 1.2 use the following command:

$Env:ASDFW_HUGO_VERSION = 1.2

However, we provide a Powershell helper to configure it:

Set-ASDFToolVersion <TOOL> <VERSION>

# so the example above would be
Set-ASDFToolVersion hugo 1.2

You can also unset the custom version using the helper:

Remove-ASDFToolVersion <TOOL>

# or without the helper
Remove-Item $Env.ASDFW_<TOOL_UPPER_CASE>_VERSION

Query the Configured Version

You can always get the configured version for you current working directory using:

asdfw.exe which <COMMAND>