How to vendor and patch avante.nvim, when configuring Neovim using home manager.

The straight forward way to install and configure Avante using home manager is to simply add it to the

{
  pkgs,
  lib,
  ...
}: {
  programs.neovim = {
    plugins = with pkgs.vimPlugins; [
      {
        plugin = avante-nvim;
        config = builtins.readFile ./plugins/avante.lua;
        type = "lua";
      }
    ];
  };
}

While this works, it also has a few rough edges. First, the nixpkgs version of Avante is only update when a new version of Avante is released on GitHub. However, Avante only releases new versions when the rust-subsection is changed. Lua-only features like new providers don’t get a release, and its expected that users install from main. Second, whenever a new instance of Neovim is opened, Avante prints debug logs complaining about not being loaded by Lazy (another Neovim plugin manager), and having to use the default vim.keymap.set API.

We are going to fix both of these by vendoring the Nix package definition for Avante.

Basic Vendoring

To start, copy the above file from nixpkgs to nvim/avante.nix. You’ll have to clean up some of the inputs, I only kept lib and pkgs. Some functions (like vimUtils.buildVimPlugin) will need to change (to pkgs.vimUtils.buildVimPlugin).

Then, in the file containing your Neovim Config:

{
  pkgs,
  lib,
  ...
}: let
  avanteOverride = import ./avante.nix {
    pkgs = pkgs;
    lib = lib;
  };
in {
  programs.neovim = {
    plugins = with pkgs.vimPlugins; [
      {
        plugin = avanteOverride;
        type = "lua";
        config = builtins.readFile ./plugins/avante.lua;
      }
    ];
  };
}

Updating

Just update the rev to whatever commit hash you want, set the hash to an empty string and attempt to build. It will fail with an SHA match error, copy the expected SHA into the hash field and build successfully.

Removing Annoying Debug Lines

This one is great; just remove the problem lines in the source using sed!

In avante.nix add a postPatch step to the pkgs.vimUtils.buildVimPlugin:

  pkgs.vimUtils.buildVimPlugin {

    postPatch = ''
      # Remove the specific debug lines
      find . -name "*.lua" -exec sed -i '/M\.debug.*lazy\.nvim is not available/d' {} \;
      find . -name "*.lua" -exec sed -i '/Utils\.debug.*Setting up avante colors/d' {} \;
    '';

  };