New user. Workflow for plugin updates?

[grimm26]

I'm a new user and found mise as a nice way to maintain installation of various tools that may not have OS pkgs or at least not up to date ones. I Use yadm and have a bootstrap script that I use a few times week to keep everything up to date. I had previously just had a list of pkgs that I would check for latest version on github and then pull down and install if I wasn't up to date.

Now I have a list of mise plugins and am using mise but am trying to lockdown the procedure for updating everything. At this point I am just doing global versions of everything. It seems like this is what I need to do:

1. mise self-update
   • updates mise itself, and git pulls plugin repos?
2. run through my list of plugins and do a mise use --global --yes $pkg
   • Make sure all of the tools that I want are installed
3. run a mise upgrade --yes to update all installed tools.

At first I thought self-update would actually update all of the installed tool versions, too, since the help for self-update says "By default, this will also update any installed plugins" but that seems not to be the case. It appears to just "update" the tool repos by doing a pull since for instance I have awscli set to latest and after a mise self-update it still shows up as outdated.

[Marukome0743]

These commands update three different layers:

1. The mise executable

   • Use the same package manager that installed mise, or mise self-update for a self-managed installation.
   • mise self-update also updates installed plugin repositories by default, but it does not upgrade installed tool versions.

2. Plugin repositories

   • mise plugins update updates all installed plugin repositories.
   • mise plugins update <plugin> updates only the specified plugin.
   • This updates the installation logic and version-listing code, not the installed tool version.

3. Installed tool versions

   • mise install makes sure the versions declared in the loaded configuration are installed.
   • mise upgrade upgrades configured tools within their existing version requests.
   • mise upgrade --bump may also update the version requests stored in mise.toml.

A typical workflow is therefore:

# Only for installations that support mise self-update:
mise self-update

# Optional when self-update already updated the plugins:
mise plugins update

# Ensure every configured tool is installed:
mise install

# Upgrade installed tools:
mise upgrade

Use mise upgrade --bump when you also want to move a configuration such as node = "20" to a newer major version. Without --bump, mise generally stays within the configured request.

You do not need to loop over the tools and call mise use --global each time. Declare the desired global tools in the global mise config and use mise install/mise upgrade to maintain them.

I verified the distinction against the current main branch with a clean plugin and tool installation. mise plugins update tiny updated the plugin repository without changing the installed tiny@1.0.0. A subsequent mise upgrade --bump tiny installed tiny@3.1.0, removed 1.0.0, and updated the config entry to tiny = "3.1.0".

This is why awscli could still appear outdated after mise self-update: the plugin may have been updated, but upgrading the installed AWS CLI version is a separate mise upgrade operation.

AI-assisted — Tool: Codex; model: OpenAI/GPT-5; version: unavailable.