There has been multiple requests now to support (piggy-back) off of asdf, since it has a ton of plugins and support for many tools. Unfortunately, building this into proto core simply isn't feasible without rewriting it from scratch, and at that point, it's really not worth it. The other issue is that asdf is Unix only, so that means no Windows support.

However! I had a thought the other day, why not support every asdf plugin through a single proto WASM plugin, similar to how our TOML plugins work (they are WASM under the hood). For example, say you wanted to use the scala asdf plugin, it may look something like the following in proto:

# .prototools
scala = "latest"

[plugins]
scala = "https://path/to/asdf/plugin.wasm"

Easy right? But what if the proto identifier doesn't match up with the asdf plugin name? Well, just override it with configuration. For example, using the nodejs asdf plugin.

# .prototools
node = "latest"

[plugins]
node = "https://path/to/asdf/plugin.wasm"

[tools.node]
asdf-plugin = "nodejs"

We can also take this further by supporting the git repository directly.

# .prototools
[tools.node]
asdf-repository = "https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-nodejs.git"

Caveats

With all this being said, I have no idea if this will actually work, or if the asdf plugin APIs will match up to the proto plugin APIs. It's definitely something that needs to be prototyped to ensure it's feasible.

Requirements

• Plugin should be written in Rust and use our APIs/PDKs:
  • https://moonrepo.dev/docs/guides/wasm-plugins
  • https://moonrepo.dev/docs/proto/wasm-plugin
• PRs submitted to https://github.com/moonrepo/asdf-plugin
• Does not need to support Windows
• Must work without asdf existing in the environment
• Should ideally support all asdf plugins
• Should detect versions from .tool-versions - https://asdf-vm.com/manage/configuration.html#tool-versions
• Should support ASDF_* env vars - https://asdf-vm.com/plugins/create.html#environment-variables-overview

Implementation

How this is implemented may require a lot of discussion, which can be had on Discord.

With that said, we can outline a few things:

• How we download/install asdf plugins should probably mirror what asdf itself does.
  • Stored at ~/.asdf - https://asdf-vm.com/manage/configuration.html#asdf-data-dir
• API reference - https://asdf-vm.com/plugins/create.html#required-scripts