Packer.nvim: Bootstrapping packer

[clason]

I've seen several questions about how to do an unsupervised installation of neovim (not all specific to packer); a core question here is how to ensure from your init.vim that all your plugins are installed on a fresh system.

Vim-plug has this suggestion, and it would be nice to provide a similar snippet for packer.nvim that people can just put into their init.vim/init.lua. If there is something that can be implemented in neovim core to make this smoother, this might also be considered?

[wbthomason]

I just saw this discussion in Gitter; I love the idea. I'd be happy to accept a PR for this - otherwise, I'll sketch up a snippet myself (shouldn't be too involved - maybe validate requirements (i.e. do you have git, is your Neovim built with LuaJIT, etc.), run a git clone, make sure rtp (and therefore package.path) has the right directory on it)

[wbthomason]

It's a bit of annoying duplication, but it might be worthwhile to write both Vimscript and Lua snippets.

[gwerbin]

Pardon my ignorance, but is git clone followed by nvim +PackerCompile +PackerSync not enough?

Note that the "Quitting Packer too fast?" bug is annoying here because you can't just automate this in a Bash script:

packer_dir="$HOME/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/opt"
mkdir -p "$packer_dir"
git clone --single-branch https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim "${packer_dir}/packer.nvim"
nvim +PackerCompile +PackerSync

[wbthomason]

@gwerbin That should be fine, but many people like to have code to bootstrap their plugin setup in their init.vim.

[Iron-E]

I have this in my plugins.lua, which is sourced by my init.vim:

local execute = vim.api.nvim_command
local fn = vim.fn

local install_path = fn.stdpath('data')..'/site/pack/packer/opt/packer.nvim'

if fn.empty(fn.glob(install_path)) > 0 then
    execute('!git clone https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim '..install_path)
end

execute 'packadd packer.nvim'

Still have to PackerCompile/etc though.

[wbthomason]

@Iron-E: would it be OK if I adopted that (with credit) for use in the README as a suggested bootstrap snippet? It's one of the cleanest I've come across.

[Iron-E]

Feel free!

[wbthomason]

Great, thank you!

[gwerbin]

Thanks for the fixes! Sorry I dropped off when I was supposed to be testing stuff...

[levouh]

If anyone comes across this and would like to follow the _Lua_ path, here's how I do it. You'd need to put this somewhere on your :h runtimepath, in my case lua/pack/init.lua, then to setup your packages, just call require('pack').

-- Rudamentary logging, just use `vlog.nvim` and save yourself the trouble,
-- but its here if you want it
local echohl = vim.schedule_wrap(
    function(msg, hl)
        local emsg = vim.fn.escape(msg, '"')
        vim.cmd('echohl ' .. hl .. ' | echom "' .. emsg .. '" | echohl None')
    end
)

local info = function(msg) echohl(msg, 'None') end
local err = function(msg) echohl(msg, 'ErrorMsg') end

local function init(success)
    if not success then
        err('[packer]: Failed setup')
        return
    end

    info('[packer]: Loading package list')
    vim.cmd('packadd packer.nvim')

    -- Uncomment/change this depending on where you want your 'list' of packages
    -- to load from
    --
    -- This would be somewhere on your `:h runtimepath`, and would likely contain
    -- a call to `startup` provided by `packer`
    -- require('pack.list')
end

local function bootstrap()
    -- Bootstrap `packer` installation to manage packages
    local packer = {
        path = vim.fn.stdpath('data') .. '/site/pack/packer/opt/packer.nvim',
        url = 'https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim'
    }

    if vim.fn.executable('git') ~= 1 then
        err('[packer] Bootstrap failed, git not installed')
        return
    end

    if vim.fn.empty(vim.fn.glob(packer.path)) > 0 then
        info('[packer]: Installing...')

        local handle
        handle = vim.loop.spawn(
            'git',
            {
                args = {
                    'clone',
                    packer.url,
                    packer.path,
                },
            },
            vim.schedule_wrap(
                function(code, _)
                    -- Wrapper to call `init` based on the success of the above `git` operation
                    handle:close()
                    init(code == 0)
                end
            )
        )
    else
        -- `packer` already installed, continue to load package list
        init(true)
    end
end

bootstrap()