Installers

Details about how the installers work and how to create your own custom installer / distribution for managed installs.

Current Installers

As of Volta 0.7.0, all of the official installers work in the same way:

1. Unpack the Volta binaries
2. Call volta setup with the volta binary that was unpacked (see volta setup for more information)

Windows Installer

The Windows installer will unpack all of the binaries into Program Files\Volta and add that folder to the System Path environment variable. It will also create the shims for the following tools in that directory:

• node
• npm
• npx
• yarn

Unix Installer

The unix installer will unpack all of the binaries into ~/.volta/bin, so they are installed only for the specific user.

Skipping Volta Setup

If you wish to run the installer but do not want your profile scripts modified by volta setup, you can pass the --skip-setup option to the installer:

curl https://get.volta.sh | bash -s -- --skip-setup

Github CI

For convenience, we provide a custom Github action which will automatically download Volta, cache it, and download the pinned versions of your tools in the project’s package.json.

Installing Old Versions

The default installer script provided by get.volta.sh only supports installing Volta 1.1.0 and above. If you wish to install an older version, you can install it using the following script on Unix, replacing 1.0.8 with the version you want to install:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/volta-cli/volta/8f2074f423c65405dfba9858d9bcf393c38ffb45/dev/unix/volta-install.sh | bash -s -- --version 1.0.8

For Windows, you can download and install the Installer .msi file for the specific version that you want to install.

Custom Installers

To create a custom installer / distribution method, there are two mandatory steps and one optional step:

Distribute the Binaries

The binaries themselves will need to be delivered to the target machine. The list of necessary binaries will be listed in volta.manifest in the release files. As of Volta 0.7.0, the required files are:

• volta[.exe]
• volta-shim[.exe]
• volta-migrate[.exe]

These binaries all need to be distributed in the same directory as each other and that directory should be on the PATH so that calls to volta commands will work correctly.

Shim Directory

The Volta shim directory needs to be added to the PATH as well, so that the shims will work as expected as well. The shim directory is at $VOLTA_HOME/bin (%VOLTA_HOME%\bin on Windows), where VOLTA_HOME is defaulted to:

• ~/.volta on Unix
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\Volta on Windows

Updating the PATH can be managed manually, if desired, or you can call volta setup (as the official installers do, described above).

Custom Volta Home (Optional)

If you wish to use a different directory for the Volta data than the default VOLTA_HOME listed in the previous section, you need to set the environment variable VOLTA_HOME to that directory. If that is set, then volta setup will still work correctly for a custom data directory.