Luarocks 💜 Neovim

A simple sample repository showing how to push your Neovim plugins to luarocks.

For more information about the usefulness of a real package manager check the following blogs by Marc Jakobi:

• Publish your plugins to luarocks
• Test your Neovim plugins with luarocks & busted

My favourite quote from the blog:

I’m a strong believer that we need plugin authors to publish their packages to LuaRocks before package managers start supporting it. Just like we had cars before petrol stations, and electric vehicles before charging infrastructure.

Getting Started

Pushing your Neovim plugin to luarocks is a very simple process, so let's get going!

Setting up a Luarocks Account

First of all, visit https://luarocks.org and register an account. They support registration via a github account, which is arguably the most convenient. You may also opt for a simple username/password login.

Next up, let's get ourselves an API key that we will use to publish our plugin to luarocks.

Creating an API Key

1. Once you're logged in, head over to your settings.

   

2. Select the API keys section.

   

3. Press Generate New Key, wait a bit, and copy the newly provided key! If you ever feel like the key has been stolen, you can revoke it here too. Be sure to copy this key somewhere safe! We'll need it for later.

   

The Semantic Versioning Scheme

Luarocks versions its packages using semver. The versioning follows a major.minor.patch scheme (e.g. 1.0.0) - the major version is increased on every breaking change, the minor is increased on every feature release, and the patch is increased on every bug fix.

We would like our Neovim plugins to also follow this versioning scheme, so let's set up a tool that will do it for us.

Installing Release-Please (recommended)

Because of the way we'll be setting up the workflow later on, it is recommended that you install release-please, a tool that automates the semver process. All you do is write commits in the conventional commits style (for example fix: annoying bug or feat(ui): add new buttons) and release-please generates a new release version in the form of a pull request to your repository.

Note

The pull request made by the Github action gets updated on every new commit that you make - this means you control when a new version of your plugin is published by merging the pull request.

When you do this, a new tag and release will be created on your repository, which is a critical step.

In your repository root (where the .git directory is located) create a file under .github/workflows/release-please.yml. Paste the following contents into the file:

name: Release Please

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - master
  workflow_dispatch:

permissions:
  contents: write
  pull-requests: write

jobs:
  release:
    name: release
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: googleapis/release-please-action@v4
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.PAT }}
          release-type: simple

Generating a PAT (Personal Access Token)

Because of Github we must generate a personal access token for our account (this will allow the luarocks workflow to be triggered by the release-please workflow). The process is quite simple, so let's get it over with.

1. Navigate to your Account -> Settings.

   

2. Navigate to the "Developer Settings" tab on the very bottom of the Settings tab.

   

3. Make your way over to Personal Access Tokens -> Tokens (classic). We won't need fine-grained tokens for this simple task.

   

4. Generate a new classic token.

   

5. Modify the highlighted sections to the values shown on screen.

   

6. Press "Generate Token"!

7. Copy your PAT to the same place where you stored your Luarocks API key. Make sure it's somewhere safe!

   

Publishing our release-please Workflow

Afterwards, in your Github repository, run:

• git add .github/
• git commit -m "ci: add release-please workflow"
• git push

Congratulations, you've just set up release-please! It will now run in the background and after a while will create a pull request to your repository. We recommend that you DO NOT merge the pull request yet, but don't be afraid if you already did, you'll just need to run an extra command later in the tutorial.

Publishing to Luarocks

After your repository has a working versioning scheme we may now move on to actually publishing our plugin to luarocks.

It is recommended that your repository has as much metadata as possible (a license that is detected by github on the right side of your plugin's page, a repo title/description, github topics etc.) in your Github repository.

Time to add our API key!

Adding our API Key

5. Navigate to your Github repository and enter its settings.

   

6. In the settings go to Security > Secrets and variables > Actions.

   

7. Click New repository secret, almost there!

   

8. Name the secret LUAROCKS_API_KEY (make sure it's spelled exactly like this!). In the Secret field paste the API key you copied from the first step of the tutorial.

   

Click Add secret and there you go! This secret is only visible to you (the repo owner) and administrators of your repository, so don't be afraid of anyone using it without your consent!

Important

If you also set up release-please earlier in the tutorial, create another secret called PAT (make sure it's called exactly like this!). In the Secret field paste in your Github Personal Access Token that you copied earlier.

Setting up luarocks-tag-release

Similarly to the release-please setup process, create a .github/workflows/luarocks.yml file from the root of your repo.

Paste the following into the file:

name: Push to Luarocks

on:
  push:
    tags: # Will upload to luarocks.org when a tag is pushed
      - "*"
  pull_request: # Will test a local install without uploading to luarocks.org
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  luarocks-upload:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: LuaRocks Upload
        uses: nvim-neorocks/luarocks-tag-release@v7
        env:
          LUAROCKS_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.LUAROCKS_API_KEY }}
        with:
          # Optional: You can specify dependencies, etc. here
          dependencies: |
            plenary.nvim
            foo.nvim

If your plugin depends on a tree-sitter parser, you should add the tools required to build the parser to your workflow so that luarocks-tag-release can test the installation of your package before uploading.

Example:

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install C/C++ Compiler
        uses: rlalik/setup-cpp-compiler@master
        with:
          compiler: clang-latest
      # Required to build tree-sitter parsers
      - name: Install tree-sitter CLI
        uses: baptiste0928/cargo-install@v3
        with:
          crate: tree-sitter-cli
      - name: LuaRocks Upload
        uses: nvim-neorocks/luarocks-tag-release@v7
        env:
          LUAROCKS_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.LUAROCKS_API_KEY }}
        with:
          dependencies: |
            tree-sitter-rust

Afterwards, run:

• git add .github/
• git commit -m "ci: add luarocks workflow"
• git push

Just one more thing now!

Publish a Release of your Plugin

Now that we have everything set up, all the pieces can fall into place. Go to the Pull Requests tab in your repository where release-please should have created a PR for you (assuming your were using conventional commits). Merge that pull request, and the chain reaction should begin! First, release-please should (after a minute or so) publish a new tag with a version. Afterwards, the luarocks workflow should trigger and your plugin should end up on luarocks.org!

Troubleshooting

I already merged the release-please PR earlier!

If you merged your PR beforehand, don't worry. We'll need to install the gh CLI tool in order to run the workflow manually. There are many resources for that online, just search "setting up the gh cli tool" in your favourite search engine! After you are logged in, run gh workflow run luarocks.yml. After a minute you should see your plugin on luarocks :D