home-manager: Reading a neovim config from the relative path instead happens in /nix/store

[rteats]

I have the following lines in my home-manager/home.nix:

programs.neovim = {
    enable = true;
    defaultEditor = true;
    extraLuaConfig = lib.fileContents ./nvim/init.lua; 
    ...
};

The extraLuaConfig part is taken from Neovim NixOS wiki, and is expected to read the neovim config I have as a git submodule in home-manager/nvim/init.lua. But, it instead looks for it in /nix/store.

The error in the output of the switch command:

error: getting status of '/nix/store/16ch7mkx4ybbjrxnalknyks8d4mzsahb-source/home-manager/nvim': No such file or directory

git status output:

~/nix-config/ > git status
On branch main
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 1 commit.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

nothing to commit, working tree clean

Is there a way to read the config file from home-manager/nvim/init.lua and not from /nix/store?

[Misterio77]

Hey @rteats,

Flakes (so, the entire repo) are copied to the nix store before evaluation happens, so any relative paths are actually relative to the flake copy existing in the store (in that particular evaluation, /nix/store/16ch7mkx4ybbjrxnalknyks8d4mzsahb-source), this is by design.

The actual issue, though, is that submodules are not copied by default, there's a few workarounds for that: NixOS/nix#6633

[Misterio77]

Overall, I don't recommend using submodules, you might want to add your neovim config repo as a non-flake input, perhaps? You can fetch any repository this way, it being a flake or not. Another alternative would be to simply fetch your other repo with fetchFromGitHub and friends.

[rteats]

Hi, thanks for the fast reply.

submodules are not copied by default

That was the information I didn't know, and the solution for me was to use .?submodules=1#username@hostname on rebuild. As of to use submodules or not, thanks for pointing the alternatives out, I'm sure I'll find use for them soon. :)

Thanks for creating these beautiful configs, by the way. Starting out with the minimal one right now, the experience is great!