Can’t start LSP clients installed with nix

[zoedsoupe]

Summary

Trying to set up helix with Home Manager and setting LSP clients commands up with isolated binaries (they aren’t available on $PATH directly), makes helix unavailable to find those executables. May I setting it up in a wrong way?

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

1. Set up Helix with Home Manager, as:

{
  pkgs,
  lib,
  custom-config,
  ...
}: let
  inherit (lib) mkEnableOption mkOption mkIf types;
  cfg = custom-config.helix;
in {
  options.helix = {
    enable = mkEnableOption "Enbales Helix Editor";
  };

  config = mkIf cfg.enable {
    programs.helix = {
      inherit (cfg) enable;
      settings = {
        theme = "catppuccin_latte";
        editor = {
          line-number = "relative";
          lsp.display-messages = true;
        };
        keys.normal = {
          esc = ["collapse_selection" "keep_primary_selection"];
        };
      };
      languages = {
        language-server = let
          erl = pkgs.beam.interpreters.erlang_25.overrideAttrs (old: {
            configureFlags = ["--disable-jit"] ++ old.configureFlags;
          });
          beam = pkgs.beam.packagesWith erl;
          vscode-lsp = pkgs.nodePackages.vscode-langservers-extracted;
        in {
          elixir-ls.command = "${beam.elixir-ls}/bin/elixir-ls";
          nil.command = "${pkgs.nil}/bin/nil";
          clojure-lsp.command = "${pkgs.clojure-lsp}/bin/clojure-lsp";

          vscode-html-language-server = {
            command = "${vscode-lsp}/bin/vscode-html-language-server";
            args = ["--stdio"];
          };
          vscode-css-language-server = {
            command = "${vscode-lsp}/bin/vscode-css-language-server";
            args = ["--stdio"];
          };
          vscode-json-language-server = {
            command = "${vscode-lsp}/bin/vscode-json-language-server";
            args = ["--stdio"];
          };
        };
      };
    };
  };
}

2. Build the configuration, which results in

[language-server]
[language-server.clojure-lsp]
command = "/nix/store/11xlc87rjqncr22hi03vifx86xv8pbi2-clojure-lsp-2023.05.04-19.38.01/bin/clojure-lsp"

[language-server.elixir-ls]
command = "/nix/store/bfcgy3kj2cj0pjm2vij9js3a1n319ayi-elixir-ls-0.14.6/bin/elixir-ls"

[language-server.nil]
command = "/nix/store/gx7dnibh4m07vywi77pbm1r1sv7zys5c-nil-2023-05-09/bin/nil"

[language-server.vscode-css-language-server]
args = ["--stdio"]
command = "/nix/store/aql6hz4y7z7czsmiff5gqfw074jdkc2w-vscode-langservers-extracted-4.7.0/bin/vscode-css-language-server"

[language-server.vscode-html-language-server]
args = ["--stdio"]
command = "/nix/store/aql6hz4y7z7czsmiff5gqfw074jdkc2w-vscode-langservers-extracted-4.7.0/bin/vscode-html-language-server"

[language-server.vscode-json-language-server]
args = ["--stdio"]
command = "/nix/store/aql6hz4y7z7czsmiff5gqfw074jdkc2w-vscode-langservers-extracted-4.7.0/bin/vscode-json-language-server"

I expected this to happen (had installed elixir-ls globally on my system):

Screen.Recording.2023-10-03.at.10.55.24.mov

Instead, this happened:

Screen.Recording.2023-10-03.at.10.48.45.mov

Helix log

If I install elixir-ls (or any other LSP client) globally on my system, executing hx —health elixir results in:

$ hx --health elixir

Configured language server: elixir-ls
Binary for language server: /etc/profiles/per-user/zoedsoupe/bin/elixir-ls
Configured debug adapter: None
Highlight queries: ✓
Textobject queries: ✓
Indent queries: ✓

Trying to configure with Home Manager and isolate LSP clients binaries I got:

$ hx --health elixir

Configured language server: elixir-ls
Binary for language server: 'elixir-ls' not found in $PATH
Configured debug adapter: None
Highlight queries: ✓
Textobject queries: ✓
Indent queries: ✓

Platform

macOS

Terminal Emulator

Warp

Helix Version

helix 23.05

[zoedsoupe]

Of course I could install all LSP clients into my $PATH, but is strange that the home-manager documentation looks like this: https://nix-community.github.io/home-manager/options.html#opt-programs.helix.languages

[pascalkuthe]

I think an absolute path shoudl work too but we do not maintain the homemanager documentation or are associated with that project in any way. Please attach a log file without that we can't do anything here

[zoedsoupe]

Ok, that makes sense. Here’s the complete log:

2023-10-02T13:50:47.401 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.nix` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T13:51:41.522 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.elixir` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T16:04:25.551 helix_term::application [WARN] failed to load theme `base16` - Theme: file not found for: base16
2023-10-02T16:04:25.914 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.elixir` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T16:05:07.921 helix_term::application [WARN] failed to load theme `base16` - Theme: file not found for: base16
2023-10-02T16:05:08.098 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `text.html.basic` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T16:05:25.544 helix_term::application [WARN] failed to load theme `base16` - Theme: file not found for: base16
2023-10-02T16:05:25.720 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.css` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T16:27:31.489 helix_term::application [WARN] failed to load theme `base16` - Theme: file not found for: base16
2023-10-02T16:27:31.496 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.css` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T16:28:24.972 helix_term::application [WARN] failed to load theme `base16` - Theme: file not found for: base16
2023-10-02T16:28:25.528 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.nix` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T18:08:33.165 helix_term::application [WARN] failed to load theme `base16` - Theme: file not found for: base16
2023-10-02T18:08:33.189 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.css` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T18:10:15.098 helix_term::application [WARN] failed to load theme `base16` - Theme: file not found for: base16
2023-10-02T18:10:15.273 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.elixir` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T18:17:13.040 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.elixir` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T18:18:26.349 helix_view::editor [ERROR] editor error: cannot find binary path
2023-10-02T18:19:33.318 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.css` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T19:00:24.748 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.elixir` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-02T19:00:35.919 helix_view::editor [ERROR] editor error: cannot find binary path
2023-10-03T11:20:36.226 helix_view::editor [ERROR] Failed to initialize the LSP for `source.elixir` { cannot find binary path }
2023-10-03T11:20:41.838 helix_view::editor [ERROR] editor error: cannot find binary path

[pascalkuthe]

you seem to somekind of invalid setup. Your runtime path doens't seem to be setup properly and the paths you configured don't exist. It seems to me your configuration isn't being picked up. I don't use homemanager and its not officially associated with us so I can't help you here.

This does not look like an issue with helix.
I would generally not advice installing language servers like this. That would mean you would have to configure every LSP individually (helix has a huge number of LSPs preconfigured). Just install them into your path that is possible with nix too.

[zoedsoupe]

Of, indeed I can install LSP clients directly on my path for now. I just open a issue referecing this home-manager documentation excerpt: nix-community/home-manager#4525

[the-mikedavis]

What's the output of hx --health | head? That should include the paths of the config and language config files.

I am also running Nix and managing my config with it (though not home-manager), so I have symlinks for my config.toml and languages.toml in ~/.config/helix/. If I add some config for elixir-ls to point to its path in the store as in the reproduction steps, I see elixir-ls working. Though I'm using the flake which is packaged differently than helix from nixpkgs.

Actually I would expect an error on startup with that config since that config should apply to master but not the 23.05 release, unless you are overriding the nixpkgs helix with one that builds from master / the flake.

[kirawi]

This is the issue discussed in #8511 by the way

[zoedsoupe]

So, building from the nix-flake provided by the project, absolute paths should work out of the box, which is the desired behaviour. Thank you for the attentcion. I’ll follow the home-manager issue as something in the build there is broken!