A small utility that allows you to compress an entire addon folder into a single file.
Do you have any questions? Ask them in our discord!
⚠️ Keep in mind that the server and client files will be in the same file, which means that if your server gets hacked, people will get the server source code as well. So you may want to use a obsufication just in case.
Suppose you have an addon placed in the addons/megagianttakis folder.
It contains quite a lot of lua files and you don't want your client to download them all separately.
Then install compressor in the addons folder, go to the game and open the console.
You must have superadmin rights to run the command.
Type the command compress_lua in the console and after it the name of the folder in addons/ that you want to compress into one file.
After that go to garrysmod/data/compressor folder and you will find the file compressed_foldername.txt, rename it to compressed_foldername.lua and you can use it!
When an addon has been compressed, the variable this_compressed is shoved into the beginning of its file to indicate that the file's environment has been compressed into a single file.
So if your addon calls include/AddCSLuaFile functions specifying files from the addon directory, for the time of addon development, stick the include/AddCSLuaFile functions in the if construct that will check if the current file is compressed.
Like this:
-- after
AddCSLuaFile("myaddon/sh_config.lua")
include("myaddon/sh_config.lua")
-- before
if this_compressed then
AddCSLuaFile("myaddon/sh_config.lua")
include("myaddon/sh_config.lua")
end