mise: The Secret Weapon for Streamlining Your Development Environments

mise: The Ultimate Tool for Managing Development Environments

Are you tired of juggling multiple development environments and struggling to keep track of different versions of programming languages?

Look no further! I've got a game-changing tool that will revolutionize your workflow - mise. This powerful, open-source tool simplifies the process of managing language installations, environment variables and more. With mise, you can save time and effort, and improve productivity and consistency across teams.

What is mise?

mise is inspired from asdf and can benefit from asdf's vast plugin ecosystem. It allows you to manage multiple versions of programming languages with a single binary and a simple shell setup.

Talk is Cheap; Show Me the Code

I won't bore you with installation details, but it's worth mentioning that mise is dead simple to install and available in most common platforms. You can find installation instructions in the documentation.

Per directory or project subdirectory, you can create a .mise.toml file to define needs of your project. Here's an example:

[tools]
python = '3.11.7'

This will automatically install Python 3.11.7 if it's not already installed and adjust the PATH variable accordingly, when you're in this directory or subdirectories, Python points to 3.11.7 which was installed by mise.

But that's not all mise can do with Python. It can also manage virtual environments. Here is an example:

[tools]
python = {version='3.11.7', virtualenv='.venv/py3117'}

This will create a Python virtual environment in .venv/py3117 folder from the specified Python version and activate it when we enter this directory. Amazing!

Now, let's say our Django project needs Node 20 for the frontend. It should be easy to define so:

[tools]
python = {version='3.11.7', virtualenv='.venv/py3117'}
node = '20'

What if we want to set certain environment variables? We can do that as following:

[env]
DJANGO_SETTINGS = 'dev'
[tools]
python = {version='3.11.7', virtualenv='.venv/py3117'}
node = '20'

Now, when we enter this directory, DJANGO_SETTINGS will be set accordingly. This is very cool, but sometimes projects already have their .env files and I would not prefer to copy-paste these variable definitions again. Thankfully, we can just tell mise to read variables from a file:

[tools]
python = {version='3.11.7', virtualenv='.venv/py3117'}
node = '20'

# Read environment variables from .env file
env_file = '.env.dev'

Fantastic!

Lastly, I want to mention setting extending the PATH variable per directory:

[tools]
python = {version='3.11.7', virtualenv='.venv/py3117'}
node = '20'

# Set environment variables from .env file
env_file = '.env.dev'

# Set path variables for this directory
env_path = [
    "./node_modules/.bin",
]

Python virtual environment demo

mkdir tmp && cd tmp

cat > .mise.toml << EOL
[tools]
python = {version='3.11.7', virtualenv='.venv/py3117'}
EOL

which python
# outputs this:
# ~/tmp/.venv/py3117/bin/python

tree -a -L 3 .
# outputs this:
.
├── .mise.toml
└── .venv
    └── py3117
        ├── bin
        ├── include
        ├── lib
        └── pyvenv.cfg

Sum up

mise is an excellent tool for setting up development environments, simplifying many things and changing the language version just by changing a number in the configuration. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to streamline their development workflow.