Assuming you’re here because you want LSP(Language Server Protocol) for your neovim setup, but your Linux distro doesn’t provide the latest version of lua-language-server, so in this article we’ll install lua-language-server from source.

Dependencies installation

Make sure that you have, Ninja Build, GCC (some distros need G++ as well), and Clang.

To install the dependencies on Gentoo run:

sudo emerge -qav sys-devel/gcc sys-devel/clang dev-util/ninja

Compiling LSP’s source code

Cloning the repo:

• Clone LSP’s repo into a directory where you keep bins and stuff
• I use ~/.local/bin, so I’ll just clone it there
• git clone https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server ~/.local/bin/lua-language-server
• cd ~/.local/bin/lua-language-server

Compile the stuff:

• Download the submodules of the cloned repo
• git submodule update --recursive
• Download the ninja luamake rules
• cd 3rd/luamake
• git submodule update --init
• Run the compile script
• compile/install.sh
• cd ../../
• ./3rd/luamake/luamake rebuild

Add the executables’ path to your path

SHELL_NAME=`basename $SHELL`
SHELL_RC="./.${SHELL_NAME}rc"
echo 'export PATH="${HOME}/.local/bin/lua-language-server/bin:${PATH}"' >> $SHELL_RC

Now re-login or run

source $SHELL_RC
$SHELL_NAME

Require the new installed LSP server

Add this line to ~/.config/nvim/init.lua or to where you put lsp’s config in Neovim

require('lspconfig').sumneko_lua.setup {}

Restart Neovim and your good to go.