OCaml-LSP is a language server for OCaml that implements Language Server Protocol (LSP).
If you use Visual Studio Code, see OCaml Platform extension page for detailed instructions on setting up your editor for OCaml development with OCaml-LSP: what packages need to be installed, how to configure your project and get most out of the OCaml editor support, and how to report and debug problems.
We recommend to install the language server via a package manager such as opam or esy.
To install the language server in the currently used opam switch:
$ opam install ocaml-lsp-server
Note: you will need to install ocaml-lsp-server
in every switch where you would like
to use it.
To add the language server to an esy project, run in terminal:
$ esy add @opam/ocaml-lsp-server
This project uses submodules to handle dependencies. This is done so that users
who install ocaml-lsp-server
into their sandbox will not share dependency
constraints on the same packages that ocaml-lsp-server
is using.
$ git clone --recurse-submodules http://github.com/ocaml/ocaml-lsp.git
$ cd ocaml-lsp
$ make install
Once ocaml-lsp-server
is installed, the executable is called ocamllsp
. For
now, the server can only be used through the standard input (stdin
) and
output (stdout
) file descriptors.
For an example of usage of the server in a VS Code extension, see OCaml Platform Extension implementation here.
The server supports the following LSP requests:
-
textDocument/completion
-
completionItem/resolve
-
textdocument/hover
-
textDocument/signatureHelp
-
textDocument/declaration
-
textDocument/definition
-
textDocument/typeDefinition
-
textDocument/implementation
-
textDocument/codeLens
-
textDocument/documentHighlight
-
textDocument/documentSymbol
-
textDocument/references
-
textDocument/documentColor
-
textDocument/colorPresentation
-
textDocument/formatting
-
textDocument/rangeFormatting
-
textDocument/onTypeFormatting
-
textDocument/prepareRename
-
textDocument/foldingRange
-
textDocument/selectionRange
-
workspace/symbol
Note that degrees of support for each LSP request are varying.
OCaml-LSP is dependent on external tools (OCamlFormat for OCaml and refmt
for
Reason) for formatting source files. You should have the necessary tool
(OCamlFormat and/or Refmt) installed in your opam switch or esy project to have
formatting support. Note, however, that OCaml-LSP requires presence of
OCamlFormat configuration file, called .ocamlformat
, in the project root to
be able to format source files in your project.
When you hover the cursor over OCaml code, the extension shows you the type of the symbol. To get nicely formatted types, install ocamlformat-rpc package.
If you use Visual Studio Code, please see OCaml Platform extension page for a detailed guide on how to report and debug problems.
If you use another code editor and use OCaml-LSP, you should be able to set the
server trace to verbose
using your editor's LSP client and watch the trace
for errors such as logged exceptions.
# clone repo with submodules
git clone --recursive git@github.com:ocaml/ocaml-lsp.git
# if you already cloned, pull submodules
git submodule update --init --recursive
# create local switch (or use global one)
opam switch create . ocaml-base-compiler.4.14.0
# don't forget to set your environment to use the local switch
eval $(opam env)
# install dependencies
make install-test-deps
# build
make all
# the ocamllsp executable can be found at _build/default/ocaml-lsp-server/bin/main.exe
To run tests execute:
$ make test
Note that tests require Node.js and Yarn installed.
The lsp server uses merlin under the hood, but users are not required to have merlin installed. We vendor merlin because we currently heavily depend on some implementation details of merlin that make it infeasible to upgrade the lsp server and merlin independently.
The implementation of the lsp protocol itself was taken from facebook's hack
Previously, this lsp server was a part of merlin, until it was realized that the lsp protocol covers a wider scope than merlin.
Note that the comparisons below makes no claims of being objective and may be entirely out of date:
-
reason-language-server This server supports bucklescript & reason. However, this project does not use merlin which means that it supports fewer versions of OCaml and offers less "smart" functionality - especially in the face of sources that do not yet compile.
-
ocaml-language-server This project is extremely similar in the functionality it provides because it also reuses merlin on the backend. The essential difference is that this project is written in typescript, while our server is in OCaml. We feel that it's best to use OCaml to maximize the contributor pool.