Mise en place: One tool to install them all

Mise en place: One tool to install them all
tl;dr

A few months ago I had to set up a new laptop for my current gig.
One tool that I kept hearing about is Mise-en-place

I decided to try it, and it turned out to be a delightful developer experience.
Need to install Node.js globally? , run mise use -g [email protected]
Need an older Node.js version on a different project, set it up by running mise use [email protected] on the root directory of your project.
Want to start vibe coding, or use AI agents? Run any of

  • mise use -g http:claude

  • mise use -g aqua:openai/codex

  • mise use -g aqua:anomalyco/opencode
    # The following require node installed

  • mise use -g npm:@sourcegraph/amp

  • mise use -g npm:@google/gemini-cli

Overview

Often times we need different versions of the same tool in different projects on our local development environment, however its installer doesn’t allow multiple versions easily.
Version managers like nvm ( ), rvm ( ), pyenv ( ), sdkman ( ) among others solved this.
While these have been very useful, suddenly your shell gets cluttered, and often times some of these can slow down the startup time of your shell if not configured correctly.

Installing mise

Mise installation is as easy as using your preferred package manager or the infamous curl to shell command

Expand this section to see a few, or see their installation docs
Linux

Using your distribution preferred package manager run to install

Snap (beta)
sudo snap install mise --classic --beta
RHEL/CentOS/Fedora (dnf)
sudo dnf copr enable jdxcode/mise
sudo dnf install mise
Ubuntu/Debian (apt) amd64
sudo apt update -y && sudo apt install -y curl
sudo install -dm 755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fSs https://mise.jdx.dev/gpg-key.pub | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/mise-archive-keyring.pub 1> /dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/mise-archive-keyring.pub arch=amd64] https://mise.jdx.dev/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mise.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y mise
MacOS

Install mise by using brew package manager

brew install mise
Windows

Open a Windows PowerShell Admin session and depending on your preferred windows tool run

Chocolatey
choco install -y mise
Winget
winget install jdx.mise
Scoop
scoop install mise
GitHub releases

As with many CLI packages, the latest package is available in its repository releases.

Mise GitHub Releases

It is convenient to have mise activated on your shell

Depending on your environment and installation method, you might need to activate mise on your shell profile/config. For example, run

echo 'eval "$(mise activate zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

to activate mise in zsh. For information about other shells see mise activate docs

What is available to install?

Run mise registry to show all available tools or mise use to pick a tool from an interactive terminal.

Interactive tool selection
Interactive tool selection

Also, the whole list is documented here

Where do the tools come from ?

Mise have this concept of Backends which determines where the artifact is going to be pulled from.

At the moment of writing this post, mise supports the following Core tools:

  • Bun

  • Deno

  • Elixir

  • Erlang

  • Go

  • Java

  • Node.js

  • Python

  • Ruby

  • Rust

  • Zig

In most of these mise can do it’s magic, and easily install them, for some like Ruby have to meet some OS dependencies, each of them has its own documentation.

Some of the backends and tool examples:

  • http Useful for binary distributed on a https url

    • mise use http:claude

    • mise use http:flutter

  • gitlab Useful for downloading from a gitlab repo releases

    • mise use gitlab:gitlab-org/cli

    • mise use gitlab:gitlab-org/gitlab-runner

  • github From a GitHub repo releases

    • mise use github:JetBrains/kotlin

    • mise use github:mobile-dev-inc/maestro

Configuration

Mise configuration uses a TOML file, it can be global or localized to a project directory.

When a tool is installed using the mise use -g command, modifies the global config file, if not then the folder where the mise command was executed.

To list the configuration files you can run mise cfg

Mise configuration files
Mise configuration files

If a project mise.toml is commited and pushed to its git repository, then on a fresh system can clone the repository, at the moment of entering the project directory mise will warn that the file is not trusted.

Run mise trust mise.toml and then can install everything by running mise install

One of the biggest advantages of mise, is that it can pick up the versions from other version managers (for example .nvmrc or sdkmanrc), but to do this, we need to enable it with a mise settings command

mise settings add idiomatic_version_file_enable_tools node
mise settings add idiomatic_version_file_enable_tools java

These previous 2 commands will modify the global config file to support node and java version manager files. Read their documentation on supported version manager files

Other features

Mise can also set environment variables, define and run tasks or define shell aliases.

I foresee disabling ohmyzsh aliases and cherry-pick the aliases from the plugins I have installed and add them as mise aliases, to unclutter my aliases.

IDE integrations

There are several third party integrations for different IDE’s

Summary

Mise it’s a great tool that can help to set up your development environment, not only that you can enable it on a git repository and allows to install the needed tools for the project.

devexp mise dx