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Building and Installing Neovim on OpenWrt

#openwrt #neovim #nvim #lazyvim

Pre-compiled Neovim binaries fail on OpenWrt with interpreter/linker errors:

ei https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/nightly/nvim-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
nvim
# Error: Failed to execute process: The file exists and is executable.
# Check the interpreter or linker?
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This happens due to glibc/musl incompatibility. Building from source ensures compatibility with OpenWrt's musl libc.

Prerequisites

This guide uses OpenWrt 24.10.4 x86_64. For other versions, refer to the original guide.

Installing Dependencies

Install the required build tools and libraries:

opkg update
opkg install git git-http python3 python3-pip make luajit gcc coreutils-install
pip install cmake
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Fixing Missing Libraries

OpenWrt's minimal environment lacks some standard libraries that Neovim expects.

Fix Missing libdl

The dynamic linker library is built into musl but needs a stub for linking:

printf "!<arch>\n" > /usr/lib/libdl.a
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This creates an empty archive that satisfies the linker without adding actual code (musl already provides dlopen and friends).

Fix Missing libutil

Create a dummy shared library for the utility functions:

echo "int main() { return 0; }" > dummy.c
gcc -shared -o /usr/lib/libutil.so dummy.c
rm dummy.c
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Most libutil functions (like forkpty) are either unused by Neovim or provided by other libraries on musl systems.

Building Neovim

Clone the repository (shallow clone to save space):

git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim --depth=1
cd neovim
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Build with release optimizations and debug symbols:

make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
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This takes 10-30 minutes depending on your system. The RelWithDebInfo build type provides good performance while keeping some debug information for troubleshooting.

Installing Neovim

Install to the default location:

make install
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This installs to /usr/local/bin/nvim. Create a symlink for convenience:

ln -sf /usr/local/bin/nvim /usr/bin/nvim
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Verify the installation:

nvim --version
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Setting Up LazyVim

LazyVim is a modern Neovim configuration with sensible defaults and a plugin manager.

git clone https://github.com/LazyVim/starter --depth=1 ~/.config/nvim
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On first launch, Neovim will automatically install plugins:

nvim
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Installing tmux 

opkg install tmux
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