LuaRocks with Corona SDK

It's not perfect, but if you'd like to add a little LuaRocks in to your Corona SDK dev, it's possible, with a little configuration wrangling.

Nothing to make this work is outside of the standard configuration options available to LuaRocks, though there are a few caveats.

Don't Path Me In

The big roadblock with using LuaRocks and Corona SDK "normally" are two things; Resolving the module paths, and compiling of the more complicated "rocks".

There isn't too much we can do about the latter. Some rocks require additional compilation than just a plain Lua module. You'll need to test, especially on devices, to be sure that you'll be able to use a particular rock.

Most "pure" Lua rocks should work, unless the developer decided to get creative.

Module Mud

The only way to work out the pathing issue, is to customize the LuaRocks installation, and creation paths. By doing this, LuaRocks still operates as it usually would. The downside is that all of the modules live in the root directory of the project. Kind of a bummer, but that's what it is. It would be nice to at least have the module files in directories, but I have not been able to figure that out yet. Maybe someone else will have input.

Script Installation

With this handy script (currently only available for MacOS, maybe someone can pitch in a Windows one. :) ) placed in your project root, can install a local LuaRocks instance and generate the configuration file.

Be sure you are in your project root when using LuaRocks.

• Run ./corona-rocks.sh from the command line.

If it doesn't run, you may need to make it executable, enter:

> sudo chmod a+x corona-rocks.sh

And then try running it again: ./corona-rocks.sh

The installer should only take a few seconds. After it's done, you can start using LuaRocks:

> ./luarocks install moses

> ./luarocks remove moses

> ./luarocks search objects

Things to note:

• You must be in your project root when working with the local LuaRocks instance.
• Make sure to place a dot-slash in front of the command, this is the correct usage: ./luarocks, not luarocks. If you forget the dot-slash you may run a system wide version, which won't do you much good.
• While not ideal, modules are installed in the root directory. Don't move them. If you want to remove a LuaRocks module, use: ./luarocks remove <mod_name>.
• You can copy, and run, the corona-rocks.sh script in any Corona SDK project folder to add LuaRocks.