5 min read • 07 July 2025

Astro LSP setup for Neovim 0.11 without nvim-lspconfig

A short guide for a full-featured but minimal setup.

Neovim 0.11 brought with it some convenient new features, such as:

  • Improved LSP setup and configuration
  • More default keybindings for LSP actions
  • More default keybindings for navigating lists
  • Configurable virtual error text
  • Built-in auto completion and better hover docs

While not life-changing in the slightest, it helps in the everlasting battle against the size of one’s Neovim config, and improves QoL enough to be significant. For a more detailed changelog, check out this blog post by Gregory Anders, which goes over every change thoroughly.

Of particular interest to me was the improved LSP setup feature. LSP is, for the most part, a pitch-black box, which meant that now that the whole thing could be configured with a single Lua table and one function call, I could finally drop some of the heavy and opaque LSP dependencies. I decided to go all the way and drop nvim-lspconfig as well, since I don’t have very many LSPs to configure and and thought myself man enough to write some config files.

The Catch

When configuring the Astro LSP, I ran into a couple of issues:

  1. Astro needs the location of Typescript resources to be injected into the config.
  2. MDX language support is null and void. Not even syntax highlighting!

There is a field under typescript called tsdk that indicates the location of Typescript absolutely or relative to the root folder of a project. Sure, you can hard-code it… but I, for one, think that is a solution for chumps.

In the default config provided by nvim-lspconfig, a function pointer called on_new_config is used to resolve the dependency by searching for it at runtime. Naturally, no such field exists on the 0.11 configuration table.

I couldn’t find anything related with a cursory google - woe is me.

Luckily, I had developed an investigative skill while working on a fucked up project involving a capital-U Undocumented Nix deployment of a Rust and Python interop scenario. The name of that skill — GitHub search.

In the words of one of the all-time greats:

Software is built on the shoulders of giants.
 -Isaac Newton

…so we might as well use the fact that someone else has probably figured it out before. If there is a specific API you want to see in action, it doesn’t get much easier than looking for a notable function or variable name with a filter on files for your language of choice and doing a global search for it on GitHub:

path:nvim/lsp/**.lua astro-ls

Any path with a lua file under nvim/lsp/ is a Neovim 0.11 LSP configuration, and holds the solution to our woes — reading the docs can suck it. Thank you, the 10 or so people who have done this before me.

The Solution

Through my search, I found that Neovim 0.11 provides a function pointer equivalent to nvim-lspconfig’s on_new_config, which is called before_init. It’s briefly mentioned in the official documentation but doesn’t really exist anywhere outside of that.

Using that function pointer, we can ape the original config and come up with something along the lines of:

-- .config/nvim/lsp/astro.lua
local function get_tsserver_path(root_dir)
  local project_root = vim.fs.dirname(vim.fs.find("node_modules", { path = root_dir, upward = true })[1])
  return project_root and vim.fs.joinpath(project_root, "node_modules", "typescript", "lib") or ""
end


return {
  cmd = {
    "astro-ls",
    "--stdio",
  },
  filetypes = {
    "astro",
    "ts",
  },
  root_markers = {
    "package.json",
    "tsconfig.json",
    "jsconfig.json",
    ".git",
  },
  init_options = {
    typescript = {},
  },
  before_init = function(_, config)
    if not config.init_options.typescript.tsdk then
      config.init_options.typescript.tsdk = get_tsserver_path(config.root_dir)
    end
  end,
}

The Full Setup

For the full setup, I decided not to bother with any form of LSP for MDX, though I did set up syntax highlighting. The full configuration is as follows:

  1. Install Typescript via a package manager of your choice in your project root.
  2. Use the above snippet to create an LSP config under nvim/lsp/astro.lua.
  3. Enable it using:
vim.lsp.enable({"astro"})
-- Make sure to match the basename of the file from the step above
  1. Enable MDX syntax highlighting using the mdx.nvim plugin. Treesitter support for MDX does not seem to have been attempted, so we once again look to the community for answers. My setup (using Lazy) is as follows:
{
  "davidmh/mdx.nvim",
  config = true,
  -- Lazy load only when editing MDX files
  event = "BufEnter *.mdx",
  dependencies = { "nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter" },
}

After completing these steps with expert precision, you should have functional Astro LSP with good-enough MDX support (I hope you’re not coding up anything that requires full LSP in MDX files!) that loads the relevant copy of Typescript dynamically from your project root, all without nvim-lspconfig! In the process, you may have even shaved some miliseconds off your load time.

For those curious, my own configuration is available at my dotfiles repository.