[General question] What is the intended configuration when using rocks.nvim as a package manager

[NStefan002]

So, let's use just one plugin as an example. I just published 2048.nvim to luarocks. I installed it with :Rocks install 2048. And here comes the part that I'm interested in. By default rocks.nvim sources the lua/ directory of the plugin, but unlike lazy.nvim it doesn't automatically call the setup function (as far as I can tell). So I guess that the approach here would be something like this: I have one file with plugin declarations (rocks.toml) and configurations files (e.g. ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/2048.lua) where I call the setup function and do customizations if I want to. I know that this could be done in a million different ways, but I just wanted to understand the intended way of doing things and try to adapt to them so I can see the full picture. Let me know if I misunderstood something.

Note: I read the rocks-config.nvim docs, so I have a few more questions about that.

1. Does this:

[config]
plugins_dir = "plugins/"

do the same thing as I mentioned above (the ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/... stuff)? The difference could be that with rocks-config I don't have to manually source the configurations, but without it, I would need to have require('plugins') in ~/.config/nvim/init.lua and then in lua/plugins/init.lua lines such as require('plugins.2048') to source the file that contains my plugin config.

2. I understood that the auto_setup option is meant to be used when you don't want to pass any arguments to the plugin's setup function (in other words you are satisfied with the default config, or the plugin does not have any configuration options). So is this the equivalent to config = true or opts = {} in lazy.nvim? I'm sorry for creating parallels to lazy but that's currently what most people (including me) are familiar with.

[mrcjkb]

Hey 👋

With rocks.nvim, there is no "intended way" of configuring plugins.
We follow the UNIX philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well".

So as a plugin manager, rocks.nvim leaves configuration up to the user, or an external module like rocks-config.nvim.
If you're using rocks-config.nvim, it woks as you describe, and you don't have to manually source the plugins.
The module will look at your rocks.toml and search for modules in your config.plugins_dir, based on the names of the respective plugins.
If you have a config in your plugins_dir, but the plugin isn't installed, rocks-config.nvim won't try to source it.

The auto_setup option exists as a workaround for the fact that many Lua plugins follow the bad practise of requiring the user to call a setup function, even if there's no configuration needed (see my blog post on the topic).
auto_setup is disabled by default (because it can have unwanted side effects).
Afaik, lazy.nvim behaves like this by default, and allows users to disable it by setting config = false (or something like that - I'm not sure about the details, as I've never used lazy.nvim myself).

If you don't use rocks-config.nvim, there are many different ways you can configure your plugins.

• One option is to have a $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/$NVIM_APPNAME/lua/plugins¹ module, and to require it in your init.lua.
• Another is to put files in the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/$NVIM_APPNAME/plugin directory. Neovim will source any scripts in there automatically.

Footnotes

1. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/$NVIM_APPNAME is usually ~/.config/nvim on Linux. ↩

[NStefan002]

I know the questions were very basic, but the answers helped a lot. Thank you for your time.