Effortless Dev Environments with Mise

July 8th, 2024 · 3 min read · 49 views

Installing and managing many development environment tools and keeping them aligned within teams can be a pain. Mise to the rescue!

Install

curl https://mise.run | sh
echo 'eval "$(~/.local/bin/mise activate zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

Make sure you restart your shell session after modifying your rc file in order for it to take effect

Install details

The install script will download the binary to ~/.local/bin/mise. Activating allows mise to add itself to the PATH and register a shell hook to run mise hook-env every time the shell prompt is displayed.

Adding mise activation in other shells:

echo 'eval "$(~/.local/bin/mise activate bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(~/.local/bin/mise activate zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc
echo '~/.local/bin/mise activate fish | source' >> ~/.config/fish/config.fish

Install Global Tools

mise use -g node pnpm@9 go@latest
Install global tools details

mise use will install and activate the tools so it is available to use immediately. The -g flag globally installs tools so they are available anywhere they are not overwritten by "local" tools.

We can run go version (and equivalent for the other tools) now and see we have the latest (at the time of writing) go version go1.22.5 darwin/arm64

The global configuration is saved in ~/.config/mise/config.toml.

Install Directory Tools

touch .mise.toml
mise use node@20
mise use pnpm
Install directory tools details

Once we create a .mise.toml file in the root of our project we can use the same mise use (without the -g flag) commands to install tools specific for that project. This will update the current directory .mise.toml file configuration.

Users who encounter an existing .mise.toml file simply run mise install to get all tools listed in the config with the correct versions.

When not in our project directory, the global version of node (latest) will be used but when we cd into our project directory with .mise.toml node version 20 will be used. Try printing the version to see for yourself in different directories.

Globally we might live on the edge and install the latest node version but for this specific project, we are using the long-term support (lts) version.

Shims

mise updates the PATH every time the shell prompt is displayed. In non-interactive use cases where there is no shell prompt, the PATH is not updated. Shims gives us access to the mise tools in non-interactive environments.

I use starship as a shell prompt so I install it globally:

mise use -g starship

For starship to work, we need to initialise it by adding the following line to ~/.zshrc

eval "$(starship init zsh)"

But this will not work because .zshrc has run in a non-interactive session (and no prompt displayed) and mise has not been able to add starship to the PATH. mise provides shims for the tools in ~/.local/share/mise/shims so we can change our .zshrc command to use the mise starship shim and we are good to go.

eval "$(~/.local/share/mise/shims/starship init zsh)"

Other Useful Commands

mise ls-remote go
mise ls
mise self-update
mise doctor