Switching from nvm to mise-en-place

As a frontend engineer working primarily in the JavaScript ecosystem, I’ve relied on nvm for years. It lets you run multiple versions of Node.js on your machine, which is essential when switching between projects with different Node requirements.

Recently, I discovered a new tool at work that I believe will replace nvm for me: mise-en-place (or just “mise”). They describe themselves as the “front-end to your dev env” 🙌.

While nvm is Node-specific, mise is a universal version manager. With mise, you can manage not only Node.js, but also Bun, Deno, Go, Python, Rust, and more. Version preferences are simply managed using a mise.toml file in each project, or a global config.toml file.

If you want a simpler, more flexible way to manage Node.js versions and other runtimes, mise is a great option. It has quickly become an essential tool in my workflow. Here’s how you can get started:

If you’re on macOS, installation is simple with Homebrew:

brew install mise

If you use a Zsh terminal shell, initialize mise in your .zshrc:

echo 'eval "$(mise activate zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

Restart your terminal or run source ~/.zshrc to activate.

At the time of writing, the latest version of Node is v24. To install it and make it the global default we can just run:

mise use -g node@24

This creates a config.toml in ~/.config/mise:

[tools]
node = "24"

Alternatively, you can just install the latest LTS version by doing mise use -g node@lts. However, this will cause mise to warn you every time there is a new LTS version. For me, it’s just fine to stick to a version until I decide to manually upgrade.

You may want to uninstall any previous version of Node.js you have, either from nvm or as a global package. After setup, running which node will show something like:

~/.local/share/mise/installs/node/22.20.0/bin/node

If a project requires a different version, for example Node 20, just add a mise.toml file in your project root:

[tools]
node = "20"

Then mise will automatically switch versions for you as soon as you enter the project directory.

Moreover, if you already had a .nvmrc or .node-version, you don’t even need to create this mise.toml file if you don’t want to. Mise also supports these files out of the box, making it a true drop-in replacement for nvm.

Finally, by running mise ls, we can see a list of all the installed Node versions. We will see something like this:

Tool  Version  Source                      Requested
node  24.10.0  ~/.config/mise/config.toml  24

This means that we currently have v24.10.0 installed, and the current context, which is the global config.toml file, requires 24. If we were inside the directory of a project that requires another version, we would see a different Requested version.