Volta does not switch global packages on directory change about volta HOT 2 CLOSED

Oh I see, it totally makes sense now, thanks for the detailed answer.

I think that what's you're explaining is in fact contained in this sentence: "Volta respects the configuration of the project you’re in". But I think that adding a precision over what "the configuration of the project" is might greatly help to make docs clearer.
For example, simply adding "the configuration of the project (e.g. the package.json file of the current directory)" might easily help.

Also I think that what you explained to me in your comment covers the whole thing so it would be good to put it in the documentation in my opinion 👍

from volta.

That is not what the docs are trying to say, but I totally understand why you are reading them that way! What the docs are trying to say is: you can install a “global” version of a tool like TypeScript, and any time you are somewhere on your system which does not have TypeScript installed, it will use the globally installed version, but when in a project which does have TypeScript installed, it will use that project’s version instead. In other words, exactly the behavior you are seeing!

So, to be extra clear:

• There will only ever be a single copy of a given global (or “user default”) installation of a package. When you ran npm install -g typescript again with a different version, it replaced the previous global installation—just like it would with a normal npm install -g, but with Volta’s extra isolation.

• When you have installed both a global and a package-local version of a given tool, Volta will use the package-local version. That way, the version you get in a project is always the version from the project. It would be annoying if installing a global version made it so the version in your project did not work!

• Volta does not support having a per-directory version of a given package or tool apart from configuring it explicitly with the volta key (for Node and package managers) or adding it to your dependencies (for packages) in package.json.

Hopefully that clears things up a bit! If you have thoughts on how we could word that bit of our documentation better, we would welcome it—and feel free to open a PR to help fix it, too!

from volta.