Environment Version Manager

A tool for developers using Windows that allows you to quickly switch between PHP versions.

If this package has helped you, and you’re feeling particularly generous, you can tip me some ETH (or ETH based crypto): 0x6515654c8e931052ab17a63311411D475D503e59

About

What does this tool do?

Prerequisites

This tool assumes a couple of things:

  1. You have Node.js installed
  2. You have access to a terminal with administrative privileges. This is required because evm modifies the PATH variable

Installation & Update

This package is installed as a global npm package:

npm i -g @getevm/evm@latest

Usage

The basic syntax for the command is:

$ evm <cmd> <version> [-ts] [-at <x86|x64>]

The available commands are:

$ evm install 8.1.0 # install v8.1.0 non-thread safe and sniff the arch type from OS

$ evm install 8.1.0 --ts --archType=x86 # install v8.1.0 thread safe 32bit

$ evm use 8.1.0 --ts --archType=x64 # use v8.1.0 thread safe 64bit

$ evm ls # see information about current evm installed releases

$ evm sync # synchronise the local version file with the remote version file; used to pull latest PHP releases

FAQs

Why do I need Node.js to download PHP?

Originally, evm was written in PHP and available via Composer, however, I noticed several issues:

  1. This method required the user to already have PHP and Composer installed and while it’s probably fair to assume that most PHP devs do, this process seemed counterintuitive to me.
  2. When switching from lower versions of PHP to higher versions, Composer (and its dependencies) would throw errors as they expect a specific version. So it made sense to me to switch to a complete different language (Node) so that evm is no longer dependent on specific PHP versions or Composer packages.
  3. It’s much easier to install Node.js than it is PHP. Node provides an executable file therefore you can run that, install evm, and then start installing PHP.

My PATH variable has been ruined after using evm!

Though rare - we’ve put in safety measures to prevent this - it’s possible your PATH variable might get damaged during this process.

For this reason, we generate a log file each time we attempt to make changes to the PATH variable. This log file contains the value of the PATH variable before we modified. If evm can’t create this file for some reason, it won’t proceed.

The logs directory can be found in the evm directory.

Why is it called “Environment Version Manager” when it only manages PHP?

The alternative was to call it pvm (PHP Version Manager) and I preferred evm.

Secondly, my intention was to (is to?) make it work with other languages to (Python?) but this isn’t confirmed yet.

Any other questions? Open an issue.

Support