I’d like to say that I have been using asdf to manage all of Erlang, Elixir, Ruby, Haskell, Idris, Rust, Postgres, PHP, Node.js and Crystal without any problems. The problems with installing from git master, tag or commit hash seem to be fixed, as far as I know. (I use the master version of Elixir and the nightly version of Rust, for instance).

The great advantage of asdf is that it handles all the tool-specific version management for you, and you do not have to remember all the different installation procedures for each of them.

I think @NobbZ’ advice thus is outdated now, but of course YMMV ;-).

@demem123 asdf is easy to install, and also easy to remove or (temporarily) disable. The self-contained nature is the whole selling point of version managers .

article should probably mention installing elixir compiled against the installed otp version eg. something like asdf install elixir 1.5.0-otp-20 - so all features are available - read more here https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-elixir#elixir-precompiled-versions

asdf has the big downsite, that it hides the installed system version completely and you can’t use it except by fully qualifying it (might create other problems because system and asdf executables are called in a mix) or kicking asdfs binary wrapper folder out of the $PATH. This makes it totally useless for me. Also it plugins for elixir and erlang don’t hold their promisses. I can’t install from git master, tag or sha, but only official releases while I have to test some of my work against master of both of them.

So I am using kiex (for elixir) and evm (erlang) currently. I don’t know if there is an easier way to do it, but for my personal testing it’s enough to be able to quick compile erlang from source and set $PATH in that shell so that erlang is used directly out of the sourcetree, while I do kiex install master and use that elixir version as necessary.

Especially the erlang workflow isnt optimal so far, but weren’t possible with asdf in general.

I use asdf everyday, it’s simple and great.