Using luarocks

[kraftwerk28]

I want to write a few things inside my neovim's config that depend on luarocks libraries. How should I install them w/ packer? Currently, I've just inserted rocks key in some random use statement so it looks like

use {'wbthomason/packer.nvim', opt = true, rocks = {'lua-cjson', 'httpclient'}}

, but I wonder if there is a better way, i.e. use {rocks = {...}}, without plugin name

[wbthomason]

Right now, that's unfortunately the best way. You can use PackerRocks install {your rocks}, but if you're using packer as your regular plugin manager, then those rocks will be deleted on the next clean/sync (the PackerRocks command is designed for people who want to manage Luarocks dependencies without using packer as a plugin manager).

I think, later today, I may add a function use_rocks that just takes a list of rocks to add. This would make your use case much more straightforward.

[wbthomason]

I have now added packer.use_rocks for this purpose. You can now write something like

local use_rocks = packer.use_rocks
use_rocks {'lua-cjson', 'httpclient'}

[akinsho]

This is a very, very minor point but I wonder if use_rocks could be supplied to startup in the same way so a user can do

require('packer').startup(function(use, use_rocks)
  -- 
end)

It's really not a blocker of any sort though

[wbthomason]

Fair point/good idea. Done in 3a8543e.