asdf: Version command fails on macOS after first installation

I encountered the same error and was due to wrong initialiser command in the wrong rc file I am on macOS 14.4.5, asdf 0.7.2,zsh with on_my_zsh, using asdf via homebrew What worked for me

brew install asdf
echo -e '\n. $(brew --prefix asdf)/asdf.sh' >> ~/.zshrc (instead of bash_profile)

restart terminal

I am having this issue as well using homebrew. I suspect this function is not working as expected when running from brew https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/blob/786fac791c242bee9222ceac792b6b78847cbb24/lib/utils.sh#L12

While looking into this a bit more, I found that ${BASH_SOURCE[0]} evaluates to /usr/local/lib/utils.sh which seems a bit odd, as it’s not namespaced in any way. utils.sh seems a bit generic to be in a generic lib dir. I’m not familiar with brew’s expectations and linking strategy, but everything else in this dir is named according to it’s package.

So ultimately what is happening is:

 asdf_dir() {
   if [ -z "$ASDF_DIR" ]; then
     local current_script_path=${BASH_SOURCE[0]}
     # => /usr/local/lib/utils.sh

     export ASDF_DIR
     ASDF_DIR=$(cd "$(dirname "$(dirname "$current_script_path")")" || exit; pwd)
    # `dirname dir` returns the parent directory -- so we end up with
    # => /usr/local/lib/utils.sh  --> /usr/local/lib --> /usr/local
   fi

   echo "$ASDF_DIR"
 }

As a temporary workaround, you can set the env var ASDF_DIR using brew --prefix

$ export ASDF_DIR=$(brew --prefix asdf)

Or, to save the startup time from evaluating the brew command, just hardcode the value in. It looks pretty stable. (for me, /usr/local/opt/asdf)

Until this is fixed, you should add this line to your ~/.bash_profile.

I am having this same issue with 0.7.2 (macOS 10.14.4 + Bash), too.

The Actual behavior from the OP is what I see no matter which asdf command I try to run.

Adding source `brew --prefix asdf`/asdf.sh to my .bash_profile solved the problem.

Anyone else having this same issue with any asdf command? If yes, should the title for this issue be changed to something more generic than related to only the version command?

I had the same issue and was able to fix it by sourcing the homebrew install location. I add this to my config.fish.

source (brew --prefix asdf)/asdf.fish

Other shells should be able to use a similar solution.

This appears to have been fixed, along with a few other things.

asdf version: 0.7.0 installed via homebrew

Running asdf version or asdf --version produced no error.

# .bash_profile

. $(brew --prefix asdf)/asdf.sh

I am not setting or exporting ASDF_DIR manually.

$ echo $ASDF_DIR
/usr/local/opt/asdf

bash completions work out of the box, no need to source manually (if you have either followed the homebrew instructions for bash completion, or have properly installed the bash-completion or bash-completion@2 packages)

When listing/installing plugins, data is placed in ~/.asdf/

Working nicely for this new asdf user.

We’ve again updated the documentation to further remove confusion on setup of the various combinations of OS, Shell and Install Method (see https://asdf-vm.com/#/core-manage-asdf-vm?id=install-asdf-vm). I believe this should remove the confusion for future asdf users.

Given that adding the correct asdf setup script to the correct rc file was the primary issue discussed here I am marking this issue as solved.

Please open an new issue should anyone discover further issues. Thanks for your time reporting and helping one another.

Just to follow up on this…

Seems like this was just clarified in official docs, i.e. https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/428#issuecomment-507058409 is part of the doc now. No fix is expected here either from brew or from asdf

brew install asdf
echo -e "\n. $(brew --prefix asdf)/asdf.sh" >> ~/.bash_profile
# for Catalina and/or Zsh: 
# echo -e "\n. $(brew --prefix asdf)/asdf.sh" >> ~/.zprofile

This should probably be fixed by the brew installer. I came here because the very first thing I tried after installing via $ brew install asdf was simply $ asdf and got this error message. I use ZSH. Maybe it’s handled for Bash? There’s a thing in the brew installer about adding some line to your .bash_profile for completions, but I would only do that if I wanted completions. I expect/(hope for) the brew installation to just work.

Sure! Here is what I have. I think I ran into similar issues with asdf back in the day as well. It’s almost as if it assumes a git clone was ran, and the appropriate config files were created. Where as installing it using brew install asdf just never seems to work for me.

$ cat ~/.config/fish/config.fish
set PATH ~/.virtualenv/bin/ $PATH
alias k="kubectl"
alias ll="exa -lah --color never"
alias vim="nvim"
export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
pyenv init - | source
set fish_greeting

$ asdf version
cat: /usr/local/VERSION: No such file or directory
version:

cat: /usr/local/help.txt: No such file or directory

$ cat ~/.bash_profile
export NVM_DIR="${XDG_CONFIG_HOME/:-$HOME/.}nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm

@tveon I have tried to get these into caveats of the Homebrew formula, see https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/785 - the Homebrew maintainers say it isn’t a “caveat” and our documentation site should detail the steps. Needless to say, our docs do share this information, the Homebrew workflow has trained people to not lookup the documentation for the tools they install, they expect Homebrew to do it all. Since we don’t want asdf to modify shell configs this is the position we find ourselves in.

Hi all, I will add another section for Catalina since macOS now defaults to zsh and this can cause confusion. this was already done, however not visually clear.

However, if the step of adding asdf to your shell’s profiles is skipped then it will not work as expected. I’m unsure how the Brew package is managed, but for user experience if we can get it to modify the profile with the correct brew dir then that would be preferred.

I am looking into documentation site improvements to make the 2 steps be displayed more succinctly and only the instructions you need for your usage to be display. Thanks for the feedback all 🙏

I’m in the same boat as @heydonovan.