Exporting my nixvim config to other machines

[mairs8]

Thanks for this great application. I have my main neovim configuration written in nixvim and now i am trying to find ways to port it to other non-nix machines.

i recently discovered the nixvim-print-init command that will export my init.lua config file. so i thought "great, lets just take the exported init.lua file, copy it to my other machine and do nvim -u nixvim-init.lua"... then i realised that of course this would not work as it would still need to install all my plugins/dependences etc. from the nixvim config on the new machine.

So i am wondering if there are any nixvim or other tools out there which will allow me to fully export my nixvim configuration to another machine?

[saygo-png]

You can technically use nix bundle for this. It creates a standalone, cross distro executable. The major downside is the atrocious startup time. For my config it seems to be over 2 minutes which is still probably faster than Emacs. My config is very large. Building the bundle took me around an hour if not more.

It needs a pname attribute to work which we don't use in our derivation so you need to add an override using overrideAttrs

      neovim = (import nixvim.legacyPackages.${pkgs.system}.makeNixvimWithModule nixvimModule).overrideAttrs (_: {
        pname = "neovim";
      });

There is also this project which seems to do the same thing but differently, it also has an experimental appimage version that might be faster. https://github.com/nix-community/nix-bundle

Other than this I don't think there is anything that can do this fully. You can manually copy over the plugins from the packdir to get plugins. You can see your current packdir by running nvim $(which nvim) and going to the bottom of the file. For things like lsps you will have to use a package manager. Either a system one or a Neovim specific one like Mason.

If you really need this, I think you could try using a plugin manager like Lazy and package manager like Mason on Nixvim for packages. We support Lazy but you would have to make Mason work on your own. You could then skip providing packages using Nix and use Nixvim as a Nix to Lua transpiler. Then I think copying the Lua over should provide everything.

[user520881]

@saygo-png thanks this is really helpful. i was thinking with the new native plugin manager in nvim-0.12 there might be a cleaner way to install all the required plugins. Do you know how nixvim hanles plugin versions? i.e. does it just assume you are using the latest version of plugin or does nixvim syntax "pin" to a version of each plugin. the list of versions for all the plugins would need to be exposed in that case. thanks again for the guidance

[saygo-png]

Do you know how nixvim handles plugin versions?

All of our plugins use packages from nixpkgs so the plugin versions are tied to that. Our nixpkgs input is pinned to a specific commit in flake.lock. We update this lockfile frequently and plugins in nixpkgs are also frequently updated so we are usually on the latest versions. We have a stable branch that is more conservative with updates.