NVM in fish

[ecbrodie]

How do I install NVM for the fish shell?

[djensen47]

May I request that this issue be reformatted in the form of a bug?

• NVM does not install if you use the fish shell.
• NVM does not work in the fish shell shell shell if previously installed in the bash shell. In fact, nvm isn't even in the path.

[ljharb]

I attempted to test this out - . nvm.sh didn't work in the fish shell, even with the shebang for /bin/sh or /bin/bash.

I'm not sure if a script can be portable across bash/sh/dash/ksh and still work in fish. For example, $? to indicate success doesn't work in fish, it's $status, which none of the other shells have.

Most worrying, all the other shells' function syntax doesn't work in fish. I suspect we'd need a brand new nvm.fish to make this work properly.

[alex7kom]

Not a self-promotion, but I did port nvm to fish, please check https://github.com/Alex7Kom/nvm-fish
I rewrote it entirely since fish is very different. If nvm.fish fits in the main nvm project, I'll be happy to contribute it.

[ljharb]

@alex7kom does your port share the same env vars and directory of node versions and global modules that standard nvm does?

[alex7kom]

@ljharb I tried to make it as close to standard nvm as possible, so it uses the same naming everywhere, and it should use the same directory of node versions if put in the same directory as standard nvm. However, I didn't update it for 4 months, so I'll need some time to achieve parity with nvm.
I hope I understood you right.

[creationix]

@alex7kom This is great! I wanted to implement nvm for fish, but never found the time to learn fish well enough to do it. You are right that a complete rewrite was needed.

/me goes off to install fish and test it.

[ljharb]

@alex7kom Honestly, if you can commit to keeping your fish port up to date such that it can be a seamless drop-in for standard nvm, and i could simultaneously use installed nodes in one tab with a bash shell and another with a fish shell; they read the same .nvmrc files; and if it could use git-tagged versions; etc - what I'd prefer is for the install script to be able to intelligently install your fork rather than incorporate it into this repo.

Thoughts?

[wires]

I tried it, works nice, thanks! 👍 Just a thought, python virtualenv provides bin/activate for bash-ish shells and bin/activate.fish for fish. If nvm could do something similar that would be nice. Also note that a .fish script could still use sh to delegate some work (installing etc) to the nvm bash version.

[Globegitter]

https://github.com/Alex7Kom/nvm-fish has worked great for me. Would love to see the main project support fish out of the box at some point.

[doughsay]

Sorry to dredge up an old issue, but with all the recent hype about io.js, and with the latest nvm now supporting installing io.js, this has become a bigger issue for fish users again. The latest version of the nvm-fish fork is woefully outdated compared to current nvm, and so therefore can't be used to install io.js. Has any more thought been put into this?

[ljharb]

There's a PR open to get it to work, but fish being wildly different than most shells, some of the changes required concern me. I'm still open to the possibility.

[passcod]

I've written a wrapper that lets fish people use nvm seamlessly: https://github.com/passcod/nvm-fish-wrapper 🐟

It works by running nvm in bash within a fish function, and doing some magic to pass the (relevant parts of the) environment through and export it again once nvm returns. Doing so incurs a noticeable delay (about 1 second) before nvm is run, but I think that's acceptable. Because it's just a wrapper, it will always work (unlike the nvm-fish port), requiring no maintenance while nvm can be updated at will, unless nvm changes significantly. Additionally, it uses the same nvm as other shells, so nodes (and ios) are shared (again, unlike the nvm-fish port). And it's less than two pagefuls of code ;P

It is similar in thought to #579 but less intrusive and requires no changes in nvm.