Lua Getting started with Lua Installation
Example
Binaries
Lua binaries are provided by most GNU/Linux distributions as a package.
For example, on Debian, Ubuntu, and their derivatives it can be acquired by executing this:
sudo apt-get install lua50
sudo apt-get install lua51
sudo apt-get install lua52
There are some semi-official builds provided for Windows, MacOS and some other operating systems hosted at SourceForge.
Apple users can also install Lua easily using Homebrew:
brew install lua
(Currently Homebrew has 5.2.4, for 5.3 see Homebrew/versions.)
Source
Source is available at the official page. Acquisition of sources and build itself should be trivial. On Linux systems the following should be sufficient:
$ wget http://lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.3.tar.gz
$ echo "a0341bc3d1415b814cc738b2ec01ae56045d64ef ./lua-5.3.3.tar.gz" | sha1sum -c -
$ tar -xvf ./lua-5.3.3.tar.gz
$ make -C ./lua-5.3.3/ linux
In the example above we're basically downloading a source tarball from the official site, verifying its checksum, and extracting and executing make. (Double check the checksum at the official page.)
Note: you must specify what build target you want. In the example, we specified linux. Other available build targets include solaris, aix, bsd, freebsd, macosx, mingw, etc. Check out doc/readme.html, which is included in the source, for more details. (You can also find the latest version of the README online.)
Modules
Standard libraries are limited to primitives:
coroutine- coroutine management functionalitydebug- debug hooks and toolsio- basic IO primitivespackage- module management functionalitystring- string and Lua specific pattern matching functionalitytable- primitives for dealing with an essential but complex Lua type - tablesos- basic OS operationsutf8- basic UTF-8 primitives (since Lua 5.3)
All of those libraries can be disabled for a specific build or loaded at run-time.
Third-party Lua libraries and infrastructure for distributing modules is sparse, but improving. Projects like LuaRocks, Lua Toolbox, and LuaDist are improving the situation. A lot of information and many suggestions can be found on the older Lua Wiki, but be aware that some of this information is quite old and out of date.
