Building neovim from source on Debian GNU/Linux

If you’re using Debian and want the latest version of neovim, at the moment your best bet is to use a flatpak. But if you want to use neovim, I’m going to assume that installing Neovim with Flatpak repulses you to your core. After a couple of frustrated google searches, I went through the wiki and found something that worked. I have put it here so that I know exactly where to look when I wish to build neovim again. So here we are. Obviously we should be scraping through the official wiki to figure this out but we have things to do. The instructions below can be used to build the master branch of Neovim on Debian release “Bookworm” (and possibly trixie).

• Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim.git

• Install dependencies.

sudo apt install luajit libluajit-5.1-dev lua-mpack lua-lpeg libunibilium-dev libmsgpack-dev libtermkey-dev

• Build deps

mkdir .deps && cd .deps
cmake ../cmake.deps/ -DUSE_BUNDLED=OFF -DUSE_BUNDLED_LIBUV=ON -DUSE_BUNDLED_LUV=ON -DUSE_BUNDLED_LIBVTERM=ON -DUSE_BUNDLED_TS=ON -G Ninja
ninja

• Build neovim

cd .. && mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install