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Luanite — the project builder for Lua.

Luanite is a project builder for the programming language Lua that is somewhat similar to Rust's cargo. It allows to easily bundle your Lua application into a self-contained standalone executable which runs on machines with no Lua installed. Every single Luanite project features its own Lua 5.4.6 installation built from source — here Luanite takes inspiration from Python's virtual enviroments. Unfortunately, Luanite doesn't yet feature all functionality that I want it to have, like automatic dependency managment and the ability to install packages from Luarocks directly, but we are getting there for sure. Read further to learn more information. Also, please remember that Luanite is a project that I at first have developed for myself, and will continue to do so no matter what.

🛠️ Installation

As for now, Luanite only supports Linux - but it will support Windows in the near future. There are 2 main methods to install Luanite.

1️⃣ First Method: you can easily install Luanite by going to the "Releases" page of this repository and installing Luanite's executable file. Afterwards, put it wherever you like on your machine and remember to put it in PATH. As for now, a prebuilt executable is only available for x86_64 architecture.

2️⃣ Second Method: if you don't trust my executable for whatever reason or would like to create it yourself, you can clone the luanite.lua file from this repository - that's where all of Luanite's code lies. Afterwards, you can just execute it with the Lua 5.4.6 installation that you already have on your machine by using lua luanite.lua or a similar command. You can indeed create an executable of Luanite by using Luanite - just create a new Luanite project, put luanite's code in the app/ folder, change up some settings in the luanite.project configuration file and build the executable. Now you can enjoy all of Luanite's wonders.

⚙️ Usage

Version 1.1, which at the moment is the latest version of Luanite, features 7 commands:

1. luanite help - outputs a list of all available commands
2. luanite version - outputs Luanite's version
3. luanite license - outputs information regarding Luanite's one and only license - which is of course the GNU General Public License v3.0.
4. luanite init <Directory> - creates a new Luanite project in the directory provided by the user. A project can't be initialized in a non-empty directory (directories that don't exist yet are completely fine - Luanite will create them for you). At the moment requires an internet connection to download Lua 5.4.6's tarball - will probably be changed in the next versions.
5. luanite build - builds a self-contained, standalone executable. This command bundles all Lua files in the app/ directory inside of your Luanite project - even the ones that aren't require()'d by any other file. The name of the built executable and the entry point of the program are all based on the values that are stored inside of the luanite.project configuration file. Needs to be ran from the root/ of a Luanite project.
6. luanite run <Optional Arguments> - does the same thing as luanite build but runs the built executable afterwards with the optional arguments redirected to it. Needs to be ran from the root/ of a Luanite project.
7. luanite lua <Optional Arguments> - an interface that allows to talk to the Lua 5.4.6 installation that is present inside of each Luanite project. Needs to be ran at the root of a Luanite project.

📂 Structure of a Luanite project

Upon creating a new Luanite project via luanite init ..., you are going to see this kind of filetree appear at the root/ of your new project:

root/
├── luanite.project      # Configuration file for your Luanite project
├── app/                 # Source code of your Lua application
│   └── main.lua         # Default entry point for your Lua application
├── bin/                 # Output folder for the standalone executable after building
└── luanite/             # Contains Lua 5.4.6, luastatic and other internal tools (do not modify)

🏗️ Dependencies

I am always trying to make Luanite as dependency-free as possible. At the moment, Luanite has only two dependencies:

1. A C Compiler, for example gcc
2. GNU make tool

☎️ Community / Contacting the developer / Contributing

Help is always greatly appreciated - you can use all of Github's features including issues, pull requests and more to contribute to Luanite. If you would ever require any assistance regarding Luanite or you would just like to join an official Luanite community, we have a discord server.. We don't usually speak English there, but we all can and will assist you or just talk to you about whatever you want in English. You can easily contact me as the developer there too.

📝 Naming

Luanite's name comes from the word "meteorite" being combined with "Lua". The space-ish theme comes from the fact that "Lua" means "Moon". The best way to mention Luanite in a conversation is to use the name Luanite. LUANITE, luanite and others are just more complicated, look uglier than the original version and don't follow the rules specified for the name "Lua" on Lua's official webpage - we also follow those.

👨‍⚖️ License

Luanite uses GNU General Public License version 3. For more information, see the LICENSE file and use luanite license command.

☑️ TO-DO List

• Support Windows
• Support cross-compilation to Windows from Linux
• Create a luanite lua command as an interface for talking to the Lua 5.4.6 contained in every Luanite project (for this whole virtual-enviroment functionality to become much more useful)
• Think on how to make luanite init not depend on an internet connection to work
• Improve the bundling system (bundle only the files that are require()'d by other files instead of bundling everything)
• Allow to install packages/libraries from Luarocks directly and additionaly automatically bundle them into the standalone executable
• Add some libraries for doing filesystem, json and networking stuff out of the box.

©️ Credits

This project wouldn't be possible without luastatic.