The base setup every (macOS) developer needs.

Workbench is kinda a package manager. We install simple stubs that install on-demand the tools you need. eg. usr/local/bin/node is just a shell script that installs node to your home directory† and then invokes it.

Workbench can run any version of the tools we support. You can control this via env:

$ WORKBENCH_NODE=^20 node --version
20.1.0

Or you can activate project directories and then we read the keyfiles in that project to automatically determine versions:

$ cd my-project
$ cat package.json | jq -r '.engines.node'
20.1.0
$ node --version
22.10.0  # by default we run the latest version
$ workbench .
$ node --version
20.1.0  # now we run the version from the project

We provide major language ecosystems and their essential companion tools and that is it.

• node, npm, npx
  • npm and npx are just stubs to install npm and npx via node.
• bun
• deno
• python, pip
  • We also install versioned stubs (eg. python3.9)
  • pip is a proxy to install pip via python
• uv, uvx
  • uvx is—in our mind—essential for modern Python development.
• rustc, cargo, rustup
  • We only operate via rustup thus both rustc and cargo are in fact stubs that ensure rustup has configured a toolchain before proxying to the rustup installed tool. If rustup has not run we error.
• ruby
• perl
• php
• go
• lua, luarocks

For everything else use another package manager.

We only package a few things so we package them extremely well.

• Well configured out the box.
  • We use sane defaults like making pip, npm etc. install to your home directory.
  • We ensure packages look in XDG places for configuration files.
• Well optimized out the box.
  • We pour over the packages looking for every optimization we can apply.
  • We build separate package for all the CPU architectures we support to ensure the versions of key tools you are using are as fast as humanly possible.
• Max’d out
  • All features enabled
• Aware of macOS provided deps and not duping them
  • But also aware which ones are now too old and providing them as necessary.

† ~/.local/pkgs on *nix.
%LOCALAPPDATA%\pkgs on Windows.