The Volta team is thrilled to announce that Volta 1.0.0 is now available! Volta is a fast, reliable utility for declaring your JavaScript Toolchains as Code. In much the same way that Infrastructure as Code frees teams from manually managing their server infrastructure, Volta takes the hassle out of installing and coordinating JavaScript tools—such as Node, package managers, and package binaries—so that you can focus on creating awesome software.

Volta is designed to be invisible: You type a command like npm start, and Volta automatically detects and runs the right versions of npm and Node. While that works great most of the time, occasionally you need direct control over the tool versions that are used. Maybe you are trying to reproduce a reported bug or testing how your project works with a different npm version. Whatever the reason, volta run lets you take explicit control of tool selection right from the command line.

The Volta team is happy to announce that Volta 0.9.0 is now available! This release includes a significant update to how global packages are handled that we’re excited to share!

Declarative UI—powered by packages like React, Vue, or Ember—has completely taken over the world. These techniques let you focus on describing how an app should look and feel, without having to worry about how the page is updated. Despite that, installing the tools you need for development is often stuck in an imperative world. In the same way that modern frameworks take the worry out of updating your UI, Volta liberates you from worrying about the state of your tools!

The Volta team is happy to announce that Volta 0.8.0 is now available! This is a significant release, with several new features we’re excited to share with you: Custom npm versions, volta run, and more!

Nothing is quite so frustrating as a piece of technology giving you an error message that you don’t understand. We’ve all felt that surge of anger like we were a character in Office Space, “’PC Load Letter,’ what the $&@# does that mean?!” With Volta, we’re committed to having helpful errors. In fact, if you ever find yourself frustrated or confused by an error message from Volta, we consider that a bug, so please file an issue!

We built Volta to make managing, sharing, and using JavaScript command-line tools convenient and reliable. To make this work, we had to tackle the problem of global installs: a simple way to distribute command-line binaries but with issues that cause some developers to shy away from using them. Volta makes global installs a first-class part of the JavaScript tooling experience, making them both convenient and safe to use.

We’ve got a new version available… and a new name!

Volta 0.5.0 is out, with lots of new features and improvements, including:

• Improved stability
• Simpler and more helpful error messages
• Safe, fast management of npm-distributed binaries!
• Idiomatic version syntax (e.g. [email protected])

Compatibility note for current users: The package.json key for pinned tools is now called "volta". You’ll need to rename the "toolchain" key to "volta" in any existing pinned projects.

About the name: This project started as a Node version manager (hence the “No—” alliteration in the old name Notion). Since then, two things happened: first, a number of people brought to our attention the Notion productivity tool, and we decided the polite thing to do would be to rename. Second, since the project has grown in scope to let you manage arbitrary JavaScript tools, we figured it was a good opportunity to rethink the name anyway!

For these reasons and after internal discussion, we decided on a new name. What we once called Notion is now Volta: The JavaScript Launcher ⚡! Our new website is up at https://volta.sh/.

Download Volta 0.5.0 and let us know what you think!

curl -sSLf https://get.volta.sh | bash

Last but not least, we owe our progress to a bunch of amazing collaborators and contributors. Special thanks to Ben Blank, Steve Calvert, Travis Hoover, Rob Jackson, Chris Krycho, Stef Penner, NullVoxPopuli, and Michael Stewart for their great feedback and contributions.

NOTE: This post predates this project’s rename to Volta.

Notion is a JavaScript toolchain manager, making sure you always get the right version of Node, package managers like npm and Yarn, and JS command-line tools. Best of all, Notion makes tool requirements declarative and reproducible by using package.json to remember and launch the right versions of a project’s required tools, so developers and users always see their projects build and run in a consistent environment.

What’s new?

Lots of good stuff is happening—I can feel the momentum picking up!

• Michael Stewart is making great progress on notion install <package>
• Chuck Pierce is getting us started on hooks and error message quality
• Chris Krycho and I have been working on the web site

NOTE: This post predates this project’s rename to Volta.

Notion is a JavaScript toolchain manager, making sure you always get the right version of Node, package managers like npm and Yarn, and JS command-line tools. Best of all, Notion makes tool requirements declarative and reproducible by using package.json to remember and launch the right versions of a project’s required tools, so developers and users always see their projects build and run in a consistent environment.

Minimum viable status update

If you’re reading this, it’s probably because one of our contributors reached out to you for early feedback. (Thank you!) Either that, or word spread faster than we expected… 😝