Installation instructions for Unix

First of all, get the latest ".tar.gz" package here.

The LuaRocks build system for Unix is based on a simple "configure" script and a Makefile. The "configure" script offers some flags that are useful for different models of use of LuaRocks. Run ./configure --help for details.

Note that if you are running macOS and using Homebrew, installing the lua package installs LuaRocks by default, so there is nothing to do!

Quick start

To get a default installation of Lua and LuaRocks under /usr/local:

• Install Lua, using the appropriate methods for your system: for compiling Lua modules written in C you'll need the Lua library and headers (often available as a Lua "development" package in most distributions).
• Download and unpack the LuaRocks tarball.
• Run ./configure. (This will attempt to detect your installation of Lua. If you get any error messages, see the section "Customizing your settings", below.)
• Run make build.
• As superuser, run make install.

For more information and installation options, read on!

The default settings

The default settings are suitable for installing LuaRocks globally in your system while allowing both system-wide and per-user sets of rocks. User accounts will be able to install their own rocks in their $HOME directory, and the superuser can install rocks that will be available for everyone.

By default LuaRocks will install itself in /usr/local, like Lua, and will use /usr/local/etc/luarocks/config.lua as a default path for the configuration file. The default system-wide rocks trees is configured as /usr/local/lib/luarocks, and per-user rocks install at $HOME/.luarocks/rocks/. Command-line scripts provided by rocks will be installed in /usr/local/lib/luarocks/bin/ or $HOME/.luarocks/bin/, respectively. The user may then add these directories to their $PATH variable.

Customizing your settings

All paths described above can be overridden with flags in the configure script, or entries in the configuration file.

Flag	Desciption
--prefix=DIR	Prefix where LuaRocks should be installed. Default is /usr/local
--sysconfdir=DIR	Location where the config file should be installed. Default is $PREFIX/etc/luarocks
--rocks-tree=FILE	Root of the local tree of installed rocks. Default is $PREFIX/lib/luarocks
--lua-suffix=SUFFIX	Versioning suffix to use in Lua filenames. Default is "" (lua...)
--lua-version=VERSION	Use specific Lua version: 5.1 or 5.2. Default is "5.1"
--with-lua=PREFIX	Use Lua from given prefix. Default is /usr
--with-lua-include=DIR	You can also specify Lua's includes dir. Default is $LUA_DIR/include
--with-lua-lib=DIR	You can also specify Lua's libraries dir. Default is $LUA_DIR/lib
--with-downloader=TOOL	Which tool to use as a downloader. Valid options are: wget, curl. Default is to auto-detect.
--with-md5-checker=TOOL	Which tool to use as a download checker. Valid options are: md5sum, openssl. Default is to auto-detect.
--versioned-rocks-dir	Use a versioned rocks dir, such as $PREFIX/lib/luarocks/rocks-5.1/. Default is to auto-detect the necessity.
--force-config	Use a single config location. Do not use the $LUAROCKS_CONFIG variable or the user's home directory. Useful to avoid conflicts when LuaRocks is embedded within an application.

After installation, a default config file called config.lua will be installed at the directory defined by --sysconfdir. For further configuration of LuaRocks paths, see the Config file format.

Installing LuaRocks as a rock

The "Quick Start" option above installs LuaRocks as a regular system package, under /usr/local. Alternatively, LuaRocks can install itself as a rock: instead of make build and sudo make install, just run make bootstrap (this builds and installs LuaRocks, so there is no second make install step).

Two installation options are provided because they are useful for different scenarios:

• Linux distribution mantainers will usually package LuaRocks as a regular package (i.e. not as a rock), so that the system package manager takes control of the installed files that comprise LuaRocks, and LuaRocks doesn't modify files that are being tracked by the system database.
• End-users installing LuaRocks from sources can benefit from installing it as a rock, so that they can upgrade to new versions later by running luarocks install luarocks.

Making a self-contained installation

Another option is to install LuaRocks in a self-contained manner. This is an interesting alternative when shipping an application which uses third-party modules. Bundling them as rocks reduces maintenance overhead and allows the user to perform updates.

In this scenario, it is not desired to have the user's (or the system's) configuration affect the self-contained LuaRocks install, in case the user or the system also have different LuaRocks installations. For this reason, the "configure" script allows to hardcode the location of a configuration file. For example, the compilation process of a package bundling LuaRocks could do something like this:

export PREFIX=$HOME/mypackage/
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX --sysconfdir=$PREFIX/luarocks --force-config

The copy of LuaRocks installed in $HOME/mypackage/ will ignore customization schemes such as the $LUAROCKS_CONFIG environment variable and will only use $HOME/mypackage/luarocks/config.lua.

An interesting option in those cases is for the application to provide in its configuration file an URL for their own rocks repository, so they can have control over updates to be performed. Continuing the previous example, the config.lua file could contain something like this:

 rocks_servers = {
    "http://www.luarocks.org/repositories/rocks/"
 }

only with the URL replaced by a rocks tree in your own website.

Next steps

Once LuaRocks is installed, learn more about Using LuaRocks.