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Introduction

Welcome to the official lux documentation.

Here you will find all sorts of resources ready to get you started on your Lua journey!

What is Lux?​

lux is a package manager for Lua. Its purpose is to manage Lua projects, dependencies, build scripts and more for you, so you can focus on writing and shipping Lua code.

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Lux is fully functional, but does not have a 1.0 release yet.

Key Features​

Create and Manage Lua Projects​

  • Easily manage dependencies, build steps, and metadata through lux.toml.
  • Full support for existing .rockspec files.

Modern, Comfortable Tooling​

  • Parallel builds and installs.
  • Add/remove dependencies with simple CLI commands.
  • Integrated code formatting, type checking, and powerful code linting.
  • Automatically adds dependencies to .luarc.json for rich LSP diagnostics.
  • Distribute projects as install tree archives or static binaries without Lua on the target system.

Automatic Generation of Rockspecs​

  • Say goodbye to managing rockspec files by hand.

Lua Versioning Done Easy​

  • Automatically detects and installs the right Lua version for your project (5.1 through 5.5, LuaJIT).

Advanced Lockfile Support​

  • Fully reproducible developer environments with integrity checks.
  • Makes Lux easy to integrate with Nix.

Fully Compatible with the Ecosystem​

  • Works with existing LuaRocks packages.
  • Use extra.rockspec for complex rockspecs you don't want to convert to TOML.
  • Shells out to luarocks for very complex build scripts (compare).

Sitemap​

The site is divided into sections:

  • To install lux, head over to the Getting Started section.
  • To learn lux by doing, skip over to the Creating a Project section.
  • For step-by-step guides to specific tasks, see the Guides.
  • For detailed reference material, see the Reference section.
  • For background and rationale, see the Explanations section.

You may also like​

  • LuaRocks. The original Lua package manager.
  • rocks.nvim. A Neovim plugin manager that uses LuaRocks under the hood, soon to be rewritten to use Lux.

Credits​

Thanks to the LuaRocks team for maintaining LuaRocks and luarocks.org for as long as they have. Without their prior work Lux would not be possible.

License​