Configure luarocks for Neovim at startup (Linux)

README.md

When using Lua-based plugins for Neovim, you may need to install some packages with luarocks. To use these packages, the environment variables LUA_PATH and LUA_CPATH needs to contain the luarocks directories. Problem is, Neovim uses LuaJIT which is a Lua 5.1 implementation; however, you may already have your environment setup for a different Lua version, for example the current last version 5.4. To resolve this problem, this gist patches the Lua paths in the startup configuration instead of relying on the environment variables as is default in Neovim.

init.lua

-- ~/.config/nvim/init.lua
-- Do your usual general config stuff

require "setup_rocks"

-- Load your plugins

setup_rocks.lua

-- ~/.config/nvim/lua/setup_rocks.lua

local home = os.getenv("HOME")

if home == nil then
    return
end

local path = table.concat({
    '/usr/share/lua/5.1/?.lua',
    '/usr/share/lua/5.1/?/init.lua',
    '/usr/lib/lua/5.1/?.lua',
    '/usr/lib/lua/5.1/?/init.lua',
    './?.lua',
    './?/init.lua',
    '~/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/?.lua',
    '~/.luarocks/share/lua/5.1/?/init.lua'
}, ";")

local cpath = table.concat({
    '/usr/lib/lua/5.1/?.so',
    '/usr/lib/lua/5.1/loadall.so',
    './?.so',
    '~/.luarocks/lib/lua/5.1/?.so'
}, ";")

package.path = path:gsub("~", home)
package.cpath = cpath:gsub("~", home)