An opinionated code formatter for Lua 5.1, Lua 5.2 and Luau, built using full-moon. StyLua is inspired by the likes of prettier, it parses your Lua codebase, and prints it back out from scratch, enforcing a consistent code style.
There are multiple ways to install StyLua:
Pre-built binaries are available on the GitHub Releases Page.
Please note, currently by default, StyLua is built with Luau features enabled. If you would just like to format Lua 5.1 code, or would like to format Lua 5.2 code, please see installing from crates.io
If you have Rust installed, you can install StyLua using cargo
cargo install stylua
This will compile StyLua (for Lua 5.1) and install it on your local machine.
If you would like Luau features, pass the --features luau
argument.
cargo install stylua --features luau
Similarly, for Lua 5.2 syntax, pass the --features lua52
argument.
cargo install stylua --features lua52
With Foreman
StyLua can be installed using foreman. Add the following to your foreman.toml
file:
stylua = { source = "JohnnyMorganz/stylua", version = "0.9.0" }
You can use the VSCode Extension, which will automatically download StyLua for you.
Set StyLua as your formatter when prompted, or add the following configuration to your settings.json
file:
"[lua]": {
"editor.defaultFormatter": "JohnnyMorganz.stylua"
},
and StyLua will then be used to format your code. It is recommended to also enable editor.formatOnSave
.
You can use the stylua-action GitHub Action in your CI to install and run StyLua efficiently. This action will use GitHub releases, rather than running cargo install, to speed up your workflow.
Once installed, using StyLua is quick and simple, just pass the files to format to the CLI.
stylua src/ foo.lua bar.lua
This command will format the foo.lua
and bar.lua
file, and search down the src
directory to format any files within it.
StyLua can also read from stdin, by using -
as the file name.
When searching through a directory, a glob pattern can be used to specify which specific types of files to format:
stylua --glob **/*.lua -- src
Multiple glob patterns can be used to match specific files, and not others. For example:
stylua -g *.lua -g !*.spec.lua -- .
will format all Lua files, but ignore any .spec.lua
test files.
Note, if you are using the glob argument, it can take in multiple strings, so a --
is required to break between the glob pattern and the files to format.
The glob defaults to **/*.lua
.
If you explicitly pass a file to StyLua to format, but it doesn't match the glob, it will still be formatted (e.g. stylua foo
for file foo
containing Lua code)
You can also create a .styluaignore
file, with a similar format to a .gitignore
file. Any files matched will be ignored by StyLua.
For example, for a .styluaignore
file with the following contents:
vendor/
running stylua .
will ignore the vendor/
directory.
If you want to check that files have been formatted, but not overwrite them, you can pass the --check
argument to StyLua.
StyLua will search through files as normal, but instead of writing the formatted code back to the file, StyLua will output a diff to stdout.
If there are files which haven't been fully formatted, StyLua will exit with status code 1.
If you only want to format a specific range within a file, you can pass the --range-start <num>
and/or --range-end <num>
arguments,
and only statements within the provided range will be formatted, with the rest ignored. Both arguments are optional, and are inclusive.
If an argument is not provided, the start or end of the file will be used instead respectively.
Currently, only whole statements lying withing the range are formatted. If part of the statement is outside of the range, the statement will be ignored.
There is also support for the formatting selected ranges in the VSCode Extension.
If there is a specific statement within your file which you wish to skip formatting on, you can precede it with -- stylua: ignore
,
and it will be skipped over during formatting. This may be useful when there is a specific formatting style you wish to preserve for
a statement. For example:
-- stylua: ignore
local matrix = {
{ 0, 0, 0 },
{ 0, 0, 0 },
{ 0, 0, 0 },
}
StyLua is opinionated, so there are as little configuration options as possible.
By default, the CLI will search for a stylua.toml
or .stylua.toml
file in the current working directory.
If its not found, the default configuration will be used.
You can pass your own path using the --config-path
argument, and the CLI will read the configuration present.
If the path provided is not found or the file is malformed, the CLI will exit with an error.
By default, when searching, we do not search any further than the current directory.
If you want the CLI to recursively search the parent directories for the config, the --search-parent-directories
flag can be used. This will keep searching, until it reaches the root path. If not found, it will look in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/stylua
.
Note: this is a separate flag for a reason, it is not recommended to use this unless necessary.
If you have configuration, we recommend keeping the file in your project root so that other developers can use the same configuration, otherwise formatting styles
will be different. Likewise, if you work on a project using StyLua, and it uses the base configuration (i.e. no config file present), you may unwantingly use
a parent/global configuration if this flag is enabled, and formatting will be different.
StyLua only offers the following options:
The approximate line length for printing. This is used as a guide to determine when to wrap lines, but note this is
not a hard upper bound.
Defaults to 120
.
column_width = 120
The type of line endings to use, supports either Unix
(LF) or Windows
(CRLF) options.
Defaults to Unix
.
line_endings = "Unix"
The type of indents to use, supports either Tabs
or Spaces
.
Defaults to Tabs
.
indent_type = "Tabs"
The width of spaces a single indent level should be. This option is used for heuristics only to determine column width if the indent_type
is set to Tabs
.
Defaults to 4
.
indent_width = 2
The types of quotes to use for string literals, supports either AutoPreferDouble
, AutoPreferSingle
, ForceDouble
or ForceSingle
.
For the auto styles, we will prefer the quote type specified, but fall back to the opposite if it means there are fewer escapes in the string. For the
force styles, we will always use the quote type specified.
Defaults to AutoPreferDouble
.
quote_style = "AutoPreferDouble"
When enabled, parentheses are removed around function arguments where a single string literal/table is passed. Note: if the function call is followed by an index or a method call, parentheses are added/kept. This is because the syntax becomes obscure.
require("foobar") -> require "foobar"
something({ foo = bar }) -> something { foo = bar }
-- keep/add parentheses due to obscurity
-- it looks like its indexing the string, but its actually indexing the return from the function call
getsomething "foobar".setup -> getsomething("foobar").setup
setup { yes = true }:run() -> setup({ yes = true }):run()
This option was added for adoption purposes.
Defaults to false
no_call_parentheses = false