Like python, NodeJS also suffers from specific version requirements. Unlike python, Node’s popular package managers don’t clutter the filesystem, so the tools to organize projects are a bit simpler. That’s because the dependencies for an arbitrary project are installed to node_modules, local to the root of the project.

Here is my setup (indentation represents nesting):

nodenv (children below are shims:)
	node (global version is 14.3.0 as of writing)
	npm (childen below are global binaries:)
		yarn (children below are global binaries:)
			gatsby
	npx
	yarn
	yarnpkg

Since npm seems to have controversial lockfile behavior, I install global packages via yarn¹.

nvm > nodenv 😤😤

Maybe, but nvm is really, really, slow. Sure, there are lazy-load implementations, but that doesn’t work if you need to use node without a shell, e.g. VSCode’s debugging feature.

Hey! yarn’s global bins aren’t shimmed!

True, but according to this issues thread, this shouldn’t really be a problem since the shebang #!/usr/bin/env node selects the global Node version when installing global yarn packages anyways.