Local Volta Setup

The recommended installation method for volta is the controversial curl|bash idiom. By default, this installs in the user’s home folder and directly calls volta setup.

This setup procedure in turn either creates or modifies shell profiles in-place – an approach that can be seen problematic. In addition, the setup tries to permanently put it in front of the $PATH variable, thereby always possibly intercepting all commands. This can lead to subtle issues as it hardly allows to have multiple projects with mixed or non-volta dependencies. Also, user dotfiles might be under version control or automatically deployed, reverting changes at any time.

The workaround is rather straight-forward, though. For a per-project volta installation:

• set $VOLTA_HOME to bootstrap an arbitrary local directory instead
• pass --skip-setup to avoid manipulating or creating global shell configuration

For a local volta activation:

• set $VOLTA_HOME to use it for the shims, configuration, and downloaded images
• set $VOLTA_HOME/bin as the foremost $PATH folder to be searched for binaries

Corresponding commands to automate this process could look like the following, shown here as Makefile:

.PHONY: volta clean
volta: .volta/setup
.volta:
    @mkdir -p $(@)
    curl -o $(@)/get.volta.sh https://get.volta.sh
    VOLTA_HOME=$(@) bash $(@)/get.volta.sh --skip-setup
.volta/setup: .volta
    echo 'export VOLTA_HOME="$(CURDIR)/.volta"' > $(@)
    echo 'export PATH="$${VOLTA_HOME}/bin:$${PATH}"' >> $(@)
    echo 'export PS1="⚡$${PS1}"' >> $(@)
clean:
    rm -rf .volta

Similar to a Python virtual environment, this will create an activation script that just needs to be sourced for enabling the local installation.

. .volta/setup

All following calls to node, npm, yarn and the like will be under volta’s control for the lifetime of the current shell as usual.