How do I separate platform specific configuration from project specific configuration?

[sewbacca]

We have often the problem where one developer has their modules installed somewhere else on the system compared to another developer, thus leading to different workspace.library and workspace.ignoreDir paths. This is why we do not version control the .luarc.json, since it is not portable. Yet some diagnostics we do like to disable for the whole project, leading to diverging diagnostic results for different developers.

Does anyone has some advice on how to fix this issue?

[cookesan]

A good split is:

• Commit project-wide settings in .luarc.json / .luarc.jsonc, such as diagnostics policy, Lua version, globals that are genuinely part of the project, etc.
• Keep machine-specific paths, especially Lua.workspace.library, in your editor/user settings or in a config file passed only on that machine.

Lua.workspace.library is explicitly for directories outside the current workspace, so it is often host-specific. If you put absolute local paths in the repo .luarc.json, everyone else inherits broken paths.

The server also supports a separate config path through --configpath, and it otherwise loads .luarc.json / .luarc.jsonc from the workspace. So another workable pattern is to keep the committed .luarc.json minimal and have your editor launch the server with a local config path for your personal library directories.

[tomlau10]

2 ideas 🤔

---

1. if you're using vscode

I know that luals server will merge the .luarc.json (highest priority) with project's .vscode/settings.json's "Lua.*" config section. So you can have .vscode/ gitignored, and write machine-specific workspace.library and workspace.ignoreDir in there.
(I assume this is what cookesan meant by "Keep machine-specific paths, especially Lua.workspace.library, in your editor/user settings")

2. maybe use ${env:SOME_PATH} in .luarc.json ?

workspace.library support using environment variables:

https://luals.github.io/wiki/settings/#workspacelibrary
A variety of variables can be used in the paths provided:
${env:FOO} resolves the environment variable FOO.

So you may consider forcing everyone in your team to define and export that variable?

---

Just a side note

in my team I use the following hack to prevent individual developer "overrides" the project's diagnostics in their user settings:

    // forbid overriding disabled warnings through user settings
    "diagnostics.disable": [],
    "diagnostics.neededFileStatus": {},

• since project's .luarc.json has highest priority
• by defining these two objects in the settings
  => others cannot override it by user settings 😀