First of all, I'm a complete neovim plugin noob. But I had an idea for my first one that would involve pinging a website to see if the latest version of software matches what is currently installed on the system, and alerting the user if there is a new version for them to install. I just have exhausted my google-fu in regards to this.
Ideally I'd like to write something like (psuedo-code INCOMING!):
local http = require('http')
local json = require('json')
local latest = http.request("/url/to/latest/version")
print(json.parse(latest))
I've gotten relatively far with this, even so far as printing out the latest version and the currently installed one. It just involved installing a lot of extra stuff (luarocks, socket.http), and I have no idea how a user installing this nvim plugin via plugin manager would have it "just work."
Any information provided would be extremely helpful! Thanks for your time.
Don't make it look harder than it is. Just exec curl or wget through io.popen and parse with the help of a builtin JSON decoder.
local h = io.popen("wget -qO- https://example.org/example.json")
local rawdata = h:read("all")
h:close()
local t = vim.json.decode(rawdata)
print(vim.inspect(t))
And if you need some extra modules then put them all under your plugin's /lua subdirectory.