How do plugins get installed?

[justDeeevin]

I'm just curious about some of the inner workings of nixvim. I understand how configuration happens—you've got the generated init.lua that does all the stuff—but I see that it just requires the plugins in there without any additional code for actually getting the plugins. So how does nixvim make the various plugins require-able? I'm pretty advanced with nix, so don't feel the need to dumb anything down.

[khaneliman]

The plugins get collected and organized into a pack-dir store path separated by opt and start and that is included in the rtp in the neovim wrapper.

[MattSturgeon]

We pass a list of plugins to pkgs.wrapNeovimUnstable here:

nixvim/modules/top-level/output.nix

Lines 222 to 227 in 31c3b36

	configure.packages = {
	nixvim = {
	start = map (x: x.plugin) config.build.plugins;
	opt = [ ];
	};
	};

Then the wrapper¹ does the rest, as summarized by @khaneliman above.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/applications/editors/neovim/wrapper.nix ↩