Neovim snap and nodejs snap

[bennek]

Hey,

Images: https://imgur.com/a/l8KVK0l

First of all question to Canonical. Why Neovim snap cannot use NodeJS snap out of the box if they are installed in classic mode and /usr/bin/snap is in the path?

For all those who use Ubuntu or another distribution but use SNAP formatted applications.

Neovim is installed in the classic form, which eliminates any problems with permissions and path access, but is it really?

We will install neovim using:

sudo snap install nvim --classic

After installation, by entering nvim we should get the neovim application start window. (Pic1)

At this stage everything works fine. It’s time to check if all configuration files are loaded correctly. For this purpose, we will create a ~/.config/nvim/init.lua file

And we will enter print(‘hello’) in it. (Pic2)

As you can see, everything works properly. Next, it’s time to install the Nodejs server, which is needed, among others: to support Language Server Protocol (e.g. pyright).

We install using:

sudo snap install node --classic

As above, snap in the classic version.

Time to test the correctness of the installation (Pic3)

As you can see, everything works properly, but is it really?

Let’s try to check the npm version (needed to install pyright) directly in the neovim application. (Pic4)

Empty! This wasn’t what we expected.

Why is this happening? This is probably the specific nature of how snap applications work. Our user has the path /snap/bin added. As you can see, everything in this path is a symbolic link that in most cases leads to /usr/bin/snap. (Pic5)

This is the specificity of how snaps work. Based on the invoked application, snap will try its best to invoke the application you are requesting. Unfortunately, I don’t know how it works exactly underneath (the code is open-source, so you can read), but such software operation causes the problems shown in image 4.

Is there a cure for this? Is!

Snaps are also physically present in the system as an unpacked snap package based on the SquashFS file system, so we have full readability. Such installed applications are located in /snap/{{package_name}} (Pic6)

By going to /snap/node/current/bin we can see that there are binary files referenced by snap using its abstraction layer. (Pic7)

It should be mentioned that “current” is a symlink and always refers to the latest version of the application, because we may have several different versions of the application installed in the system.

So what happens if we query this binary directly from within Neovim? Bingo! (Pic8)

So what do we need to do to make neovim snap and nodejs snap work properly? Nothing could be further from the truth. We need to extend our user path with another folder containing executable files.

In .profile or any other file that is sourced upon launching terminal:

export PATH=/snap/node/current/bin:$PATH

After these operations, LSP, Copilot and many others will work properly.