Automatically Refreshing NVim plugins

One of the key benefits of modern editors like NVim, Vim, or Emacs is the rich plugin ecosystem. After years with Vim, I switched to NVim and was immediately impressed by its plugin landscape. The Lazy plugin manager—available for NVim > 0.8—quickly became my favourite. Lazy simplifies plugin discovery and management. It offers an intuitive interface and powerful commands that make it easy to add, remove, or update plugins.

Auto-Updating Plugins

As I added more plugins, Lazy frequently prompted me to update them. I found myself running updates manually almost every session. Naturally, I wanted to automate this.

Lazy supports execution of custom commands. Its configuration allows binding actions to various events. One useful event is VeryLazy, but more generally, NVim’s autocommand system provides a robust mechanism for triggering code on specific actions. Inspired by a gist by dtr2300, I chose to trigger plugin updates on the FocusLost event. This means NVim will automatically check for updates whenever I switch to another window—an ideal, non-disruptive moment.

Here’s the Lua code I use:

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-- File: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim/lua/config/autocmds.lua

local function augroup(name)
  return vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("lazyvim_" .. name, { clear = true })
end

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("FocusLost", {
  group = augroup("autoupdate"),
  callback = function()
    if require("lazy.status").has_updates() then
      vim.notify("🔄 Updating plugins...", vim.log.levels.INFO)
      require("lazy").update({
        show = false,
        -- This callback runs after update is done
        concurrency = nil,
        lockfile = nil,
        wait = true,
        plugins = nil,
        pin = nil,
        exclude = nil,
        callback = function(updated)
          if updated and #updated > 0 then
            vim.notify("✅ Lazy updated " .. #updated .. " plugin(s).", 
                vim.log.levels.INFO)
          else
            vim.notify("✅ Lazy check complete. No plugins updated.", 
                vim.log.levels.INFO)
          end
        end,
      })
    end
  end,
})

Note that some plugins may require a manual reload after updating. Lazy.nvim now supports an experimental :Lazy reload plugin_name command, but this is not automatically triggered after updates. Reloading works best with plugins that implement a proper deactivate function or are explicitly marked as safe to reload. For others, re-running config functions can cause issues, so use this feature cautiously and check each plugin’s documentation or behavior before relying on it.

The configuration lives in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim/lua/config/autocmds.lua ¹. Depe