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Managing educates versions with educatesenv

· 3 min read
Jorge Morales Pou
Jorge Morales Pou
Lead Software Engineer

Managing multiple versions of the educates training platform binary can be a hassle—especially when you need to switch between versions for different projects, test new releases, or roll back to a previous version. Manual downloads, renaming, and path management are error-prone and time-consuming.

Enter educatesenv, a simple CLI tool to install, switch, and manage multiple versions of the educates CLI, inspired by tools like tfenv and rbenv.

Why use educatesenv?​

  • Easy version switching: No more manual downloads or symlink juggling.
  • Safe experimentation: Try new releases without losing your current setup.
  • Development mode: Test local builds easily.
  • Cross-platform: Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Getting started​

Install educatesenv from GitHub Releases.

Initialize your edcuatesenv environment:

educatesenv init --download

This will create default configuration file and folders in .educatesenv in your user's home's directory, and will show you PATH instructions to have the tool ready to be used.

Common tasks​

List remote versions​

You can get a list of all available versions from GitHub:

educatesenv list-remote

You can also include pre-releases, which is convenient if you need to test a release candidate:

educatesenv list-remote --all

To show only the 10 most recent versions:

educatesenv list-remote --recents

Install a specific version​

Install a specific version:

educatesenv install 3.3.2

Or always get the latest released version available at the time:

educatesenv install latest

Installing a version doesn't make it readily available to use. For that there's another command (use) but you might want to do both actions at once.

Set the installed version as active immediately:

educatesenv install 3.3.2 --use

List installed versions​

You might end up having multiple versions installed. To find out what are the versions of Educates CLI you have locally installed, use:

educatesenv list

Use a version​

In order to switch between all your installed versions and make it the active one:

educatesenv use 3.3.2

Uninstall a version​

When you no longer need a specific version, and to keep your local computer free of old software, you can remove a version you no longer need:

educatesenv uninstall 3.3.2

Bonus for Educates Developers​

Educates developers might want to use the same mechanism to select the Educates CLI version they are using. They can enable in the configuration file development configuration:

You can see your configuration file by:

educatesenv confiv view

and add/edit these configuration snippet:

development:
    enabled: true
    binaryLocation: /Users/USER/repositories/educates-training-platform/client-programs/bin/educates-darwin-arm64

Once you have done that, you can select the develop version from the list of available versions:

educatesenv use develop

There's an additional configuration to provide a GitHub repository and token to get your educates binaries from a private repository

Conclusion​

educatesenv makes it easy to manage multiple versions of the educates binary, so you can always work with the latest version you need. Try it out and simplify your workflow!