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📂 Structuring Your Plugins

Some users may want to split their plugin specs in multiple files. Instead of passing a spec table to setup(), you can use a Lua module. The specs from the module and any top-level sub-modules will be merged together in the final spec, so it is not needed to add require calls in your main plugin file to the other files.

The benefits of using this approach:

  • Simple to add new plugin specs. Just create a new file in your plugins module.
  • Allows for caching of all your plugin specs. This becomes important if you have a lot of smaller plugin specs.
  • Spec changes will automatically be reloaded when they're updated, so the :Lazy UI is always up to date.

Example:

  • ~/.config/nvim/init.lua
require("lazy").setup("plugins")
  • ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins.lua or ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/init.lua (this file is optional)
return {
  "folke/neodev.nvim",
  "folke/which-key.nvim",
  { "folke/neoconf.nvim", cmd = "Neoconf" },
}
  • Any lua file in ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/*.lua will be automatically merged in the main plugin spec

For a real-life example, you can check LazyVim and more specifically:

↩ī¸ Importing Specs, config & opts​

As part of a spec, you can add import statements to import additional plugin modules. Both of the setup() calls are equivalent:

require("lazy").setup("plugins")

-- Same as:
require("lazy").setup({{import = "plugins"}})

To import multiple modules from a plugin, add additional specs for each import. For example, to import LazyVim core plugins and an optional plugin:

require("lazy").setup({
  spec = {
    { "LazyVim/LazyVim", import = "lazyvim.plugins" },
    { import = "lazyvim.plugins.extras.coding.copilot" },
  }
})

When you import specs, you can override them by simply adding a spec for the same plugin to your local specs, adding any keys you want to override / merge.

opts, dependencies, cmd, event, ft and keys are always merged with the parent spec. Any other property will override the property from the parent spec.