neovim: vim.fn is nil

Question

I have a lua plugins script defining local fn = vim.fn. A couple of lines later it defines local install_path = fn.stdpath('data'). This script is called from my init.vim by lua require('plugins').

Whenever I start nvim, I get the error message: Error while calling lua chunk: /home/MYUSERNAME/.config/nvim/lua/plugins.lua: attempt to index local 'fn' (a nil value),

So I figure, vim.fn is nil. I guess something with my setup is wrong, but I don't know what and I don't know how to debug this. The only idea I had was running :checkhealth. It gave me no errors:

health#nvim#check                                                                
========================================================================         
## Configuration                                                                 
  - OK: no issues found                                                          
                                                                                  
## Performance                                                                   
  - OK: Build type: Release                                                      
                                                                                   
## Remote Plugins                                                                
  - OK: Up to date                                                               

## terminal                                                                         
  - INFO: key_backspace (kbs) terminfo entry: key_backspace=\177                 
  - INFO: key_dc (kdch1) terminfo entry: key_dc=\E[3~                            
  - INFO: $VTE_VERSION='6003'                                                    
  - INFO: $COLORTERM='truecolor'

I also tried un- and reinstalling neovim already

$ sudo apt remove neovim
$ sudo apt install neovim

My machine is running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

What could be the source of this bug, how can I debug and fix this?

Answer 1

I had similar issue with my Ubuntu 20.04 running on WSL2.

After type nvim -v, found out sudo apt install neovim can only install older version, not sure why.

Follow this link to install a latest versioni, https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Installing-Neovim#ubuntu. I installed stable version 0.7.2, but i guess latest pre-release version will do also.