Mason (plugin)

Mason is a Neovim plugin that downloads, installs and upgrades LSP servers, DAP Adapters, linters and formatters for many different languages. While it is not a requirement to use it, it's strongly recommended.

Mason is invoked from within Neovim with the command Mason. By default it will install plugins to stdpath("data")/mason. On Linux, that would be $HOME/.local/share/nvim/mason. Within this directory, Mason will create various subdirectories of which the bin directory is of particular interest. This is where the executables of all installed language servers can be found. You can add this to your $PATH or simply configure it via Lspdef. Mason, by default, uses a registry for installable packages and can be configured to use 3^rd party registries for packages that are not available in the default registry.

Using unchecked registries can pose a security hazard. Please understand, that downloading and installing from sites you cannot fully trust can always result in security breaches. While the default Mason registry should be relatively safe — the author does watch it and all language servers are downloaded and installed from official repositories — third party registries might be not so well audited.