CHANGELOG.md

What's new in LuaRocks 3.9.2

• Configuration now honors typical compiler environment variables for all build backends:
  • MAKE, CC, AR, RANLIB on Unix
  • MAKE, CC, AR, WINDRES, LINK, MT on Windows
• builtin build mode now supports Clang on Windows
• luarocks test now checks/installs all dependency kinds (build, runtime, test), so you don't need to run luarocks make --only-deps in CI environments to get all dependencies needed to run a test
• MinGW: default to x86_64 compiler on 64-bit platforms
• Fixed crash if variables.LUA* are unset in configuration
• Fix luarocks test --prepare behavior for non-Busted tests
• Internal API fixes
  • path.path_to_module: accept custom file extensions in package path variables
  • persist.save_from_table: ensure directory exists when saving a file

What's new in LuaRocks 3.9.1

• Fixed error message when Lua library is not found
• Fixed build of Windows binary
• A couple of minor feature additions:
  • API: loader.which has a new mode for searching package.path/cpath
    • Adds a new second argument, where, a string which indicates places to search for the module. If where contains "l", it will search using the LuaRocks loader; if it contains "p", it will look in the filesystem using package.path and package.cpath. You can use both at the same time.
  • --no-project flag can be used to override .luarocks project directory detection

What's new in LuaRocks 3.9.0

• builtin build mode now always respects CC, CFLAGS and LDFLAGS
• Check that lua.h version matches the desired Lua version
• Check that the version of the Lua C library matches the desired Lua version
• Fixed deployment of non-wrapped binaries
• Fixed crash when --lua-version option is malformed
• Fixed help message for --pin option
• Unix: use native methods and don't always rely on $USER to determine user
• Windows: use native CLI tooling more
• macOS: support .tbd extension when checking for libraries
• macOS: add XCode SDK path to search paths
• macOS: add best-effort heuristic for library search using Homebrew paths
• macOS: avoid quoting issues with LIBFLAG
• macOS: deployment target is now 11.0 on macOS 11+
• added DragonFly BSD support
• LuaRocks test suite now runs on Lua 5.4 and LuaJIT
• Internal dependencies of standalone LuaRocks executable were bumped

What's new in LuaRocks 3.8.0

• Support GitHub's protocol security changes transparently.
  • The raw git:// protocol will stop working on GitHub. LuaRocks already supports git+https:// as an alternative, but to avoid having to update every rockspec in the repository that uses git://github.com, which would require a large coordinated effort, LuaRocks now auto-converts github.com and www.github.com URLs that use git:// to git+https://
• luarocks test has a new flag --prepare that checks, downloads and installs the tool requirements and rockspec dependencies but does not run the test suite for the rockspec being tested.
• Code tweaks so that LuaRocks can run on a Lua interpreter built without the debug library.
• luarocks upload supports uploading pre-packaged .src.rock files.
• Configuration fixes for OpenBSD.
• Respect the existing value for the variables.LUALIB configuration variable if given explicitly by the user in the config file, rather than trying to override it with auto-detection.
• Windows fixes for setting file permissions:
  • Revert the use of Everyone back to *S-1-1-0
  • Quote the use of the %USERNAME% variable to support names with spaces

What's new in LuaRocks 3.7.0

• Improved connectivity resiliency
  • LuaRocks can now use mirrors for downloading rocks even if downloading the manifest from the main server succeeds. In previous versions, LuaRocks would check whether to use a mirror in the first download operation, when it fetches the manifest. Once the server (luarocks.org or one of its default mirrors) was chosen, it would stick with it for the rest of the command. The resulting behavior was that if the manifest fails to load, it switches to a mirror and continues from there. But if the manifest fetches ok and the then actual rock download fails, it would give up, instead of trying that in a mirror as well. Now, it retries every download on a mirror whenever the base URL matches one configured in cfg.rocks_servers. The original behavior was satisfactory if there was complete downtime in the main server, but this new behavior should make the CLI much more resilient with regard to any intermittent failures happening on the main server.
• On Unix, it now respects environment variables $XDG_CACHE_HOME and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
  • This means the user's configuration typically resides in ~/.config/luarocks/ as per the XDG standard
  • The legacy path ~/.luarocks/ continues to be tested first, for backwards compatibility
• Fixes check for the default Lua version set in the user's home configuration
• Fixes an issue on Windows where it would incorrectly revoke permissions from the current user when installing

What's new in LuaRocks 3.6.0

• Adds a double-check step to verify that all files from a rock are installed
• Improve resilience of the manifest reader to deal with manifests written with older versions of LuaRocks lower than 3.0
• luarocks pack now checks that the directory inside the archive being packed as a .src.rock actually exists, refusing to pack an invalid rock from a badly configured rockspec.
• Fixes behavior of luarocks pack when the url entry of a rockspec points to a bare file.
• Remove an entry from the manifest if the rock itself is already missing
• The configure script now checks that the version of lua.h found matches that of the Lua interpreter detected or configured
• Fixes the renaming of scripts when multiple versions are installed
• Fixes availability check for svn for rockspecs using Subversion
• Fixes for running with an empty PATH environment variable
• Portability improvements:
  • Windows: vcvarsall.bat output is now properly redirected to NUL meaning that the output of luarocks path can be used in scripts
  • Fixes autodetection for Cygwin
  • Handles macOS versions greater than 10.10
  • Adds platform specific configurations for NetBSD
  • Respects CC/CFLAGS/LDFLAGS on FreeBSD
• Luacheck now runs on the LuaRocks CI
• Distributed binaries are built using Lua 5.3

What's new in LuaRocks 3.5.0

This is a small release:

• Added support for MSYS2 and Mingw-w64
• Reverted the change in MSVC environment variable set up script
• Fixes a bug where --verbose raised an exception with a nil argument
• Added proper error messages when lua.h is invalid

What's new in LuaRocks 3.4.0

Features

• luarocks make now supports --only-deps
• luarocks make new flag: --no-install, which only performs the compilation step
• --deps-only is now an alias for --only-deps (useful in case you always kept getting it wrong, like me!)
• luarocks build and luarocks make now support using --pin and --only-deps at the same time, to produce a lock file of dependencies in use without installing the main package.
• luarocks show can now accept a substring of the rock's name, like list.
• luarocks config: when running without system-wide permissions, try storing the config locally by default. Also, if setting both lua_dir and --lua-version explicitly, auto-switch the default Lua version.
• luarocks with no arguments now prints more info about the location of the Lua interpreter which is being used
• luarocks new_version now keeps the old URL if the MD5 doesn't change.
• DEPS_DIR is now accepted as a generic variable for dependency directories (e.g. luarocks install foo DEPS_DIR=/usr/local)
• Handle quoting of arguments at the application level, for improved Windows support
• All-in-one binary bundles dkjson, so it runs luarocks upload without requiring any additional dependencies.
• Tweaks for Terra compatibility

Fixes

• win32: generate proper temp filename
• No longer assume that Lua 5.3 is built with compat libraries and bundles bit32
• luarocks show: do not crash when rockspec description is empty
• When detecting the location of lua.h, check that its version matches the version of Lua being used
• Fail gracefully when a third-party tool (wget, etc.) is missing
• Fix logic for disabling mirrors that return network errors
• Fix detection of Lua path based on arg variable
• Fix regression on dependency matching of luarocks.loader

What's new in LuaRocks 3.3.1

This is a bugfix release:

• Fix downgrades of rocks containing directories: stop it from creating spurious 0-byte files where directories have been
• Fix error message when attempting to copy a file that is missing
• Detect OpenBSD-specific dependency paths

What's new in LuaRocks 3.3.0

Features

• Dependency pinning
  • Adds a new flag called --pin which creates a luarocks.lock when building a rock with luarocks build or luarocks make. This lock file contains the exact version numbers of every direct or indirect dependency of the rock (in other words, it is the transitive closure of the dependencies.) For make, the luarocks.lock file is created in the current directory. The lock file is also installed as part of the rock in its metadata directory alongside its rockspec. When using --pin, if a lock file already exists, it is ignored and overwritten.
  • When building a rock with luarocks make, if there is a luarocks.lock file in the current directory, the exact versions specified there will be used for resolving dependencies.
  • When building a rock with luarocks build, if there is a luarocks.lock file in root of its sources, the exact versions specified there will be used for resolving dependencies.
  • When installing a .rock file with luarocks install, if the rock contains a luarocks.lock file (i.e., if its dependencies were pinned with --pin when the rock was built), the exact versions specified there will be used for resolving dependencies.
• Improved VM type detection to support moonjit
• git: Support for shallow recommendations
• Initial support for Windows on ARM
• Support for building 64-bit Windows all-in-one binary
• More filesystem debugging output when using --verbose (now it reports operations even when using LuaFileSystem-backed implementations)
• --no-manifest flag for creating a package without updating the manifest files
• --no-doc flag is now supported by luarocks make

Performance improvements

• Speed up dependency checks
• Speed up installation and deletion when deploying files
• build: do not download sources when when building with --only-deps
• New flag --check-lua-versions: when a rock name is not found, only checks for availability in other Lua versions if this flag is given

Fixes

• safer rollback on installation failure
• config: fix --unset flag
• Fix command name invocations with dashes (e.g. luarocks-admin make-manifest)
• Fix fallback to PATH search when Lua interpreter is not configured
• Windows: support usernames with spaces
• Windows: fix generation of temporary filenames (#1058)
• Windows: force .lib over .dll extension when resolving LUALIB

What's new in LuaRocks 3.2.1

• fix installation of LuaRocks via rockspec (make bootstrap and luarocks install): correct a problem in the initialization of the luarocks.fs module and its interaction with the cfg module.
• fix luarocks build --pack-binary-rock --no-doc
• fix luarocks build --branch
• luarocks init: fix Lua wrapper for interactive mode
• fix compatibility issues with command add-ons loaded via luarocks.cmd.external modules
• correct override of config values via CLI flags

What's new in LuaRocks 3.2.0

LuaRocks 3.2.0 now uses argument parsing based on argparse instead of a homegrown parser. This was implemented by Paul Ouellette as his Google Summer of Code project, mentored by Daurnimator.

Release highlights:

• Bugfix: luarocks path does not change the order of pre-existing path items when prepending or appending to path variables
• Bugfix: fix directory detection on the Mac
• When building with --force-config, LuaRocks now never uses the "project" directory, but only the forced configuration
• Lua libdir is now only checked for commands/platforms that really need to link Lua explicitly
• LuaJIT is now detected dynamically
• RaptorJIT is now detected as a LuaJIT variant
• Improvements in Lua autodetection at runtime
• luarocks new_version: new option --dir
• luarocks which: report modules found via package.path and package.cpath as well
• install.bat: Improved detection for Visual Studio 2017 and higher
• Bundled LuaSec in all-in-one binary bumped to version 0.8.1

What's new in LuaRocks 3.1.3

This is another bugfix release, that incldes a couple of fixes, including better Lua detection, and fixes specific to MacOS and FreeBSD.

What's new in LuaRocks 3.1.2

This is again a small fix release.

What's new in LuaRocks 3.1.1

This is a hotfix release fixing an issue that affected initialization in some scenarios.

What's new in LuaRocks 3.1.0

More powerful luarocks config

The luarocks config command used to only list the current configuration. It is now able to query and also set individual values, like git config. You can now do things such as:

luarocks config variables.OPENSSL_DIR /usr/local/openssl luarocks config lua_dir /usr/local luarocks config lua_version 5.3

and it will rewrite your luarocks configuration to store that value for later reuse. Note that setting lua_version will make that Lua version the default for luarocks invocations (you can always override on a per-call basis with --lua-version.

You can specify the scope where you will apply the configuration change: system-wide, to the user's home config (with --local), or specifically to a project, if you run the command from within a project directory initialized with luarocks init.

New --global flag

Some users prefer that LuaRocks default to system-wide installations, some users prefer to install everything to their home directory. The local_by_default configuration file controls this preference: when it is off, the --local file triggers user-specific. Before 3.1.0 there was no convenient way to trigger system-wide installations when local_by_default was set to true. LuaRocks 3.1.0 adds a --global flag to this purpose. To enable local-by-default, you can now do:

luarocks config local_by_default true

luarocks make can deal with patches

A rockspec can include embedded patch files, which are applied when a source rock is built. Now, when you run luarocks make on a source tree unpacked with luarocks unpack, the patches will be applied as well (and a hidden lockfile is created to avoid the patches to be re-applied incorrectly).

Smarter defaults when working with projects

When working on a project initialized with luarocks init, the presence of a ./.luarocks/config-5.x.lua file will be enough to detect the project-based workflow and have luarocks default to that 5.x version. That means the ./luarocks wrapper becomes less necessary; the luarocks from your $PATH will deal with the project just fine, git-style.

And more!

There are also other improvements. LuaRocks uses the manifest cache a bit more aggressively, resulting in increased performance. Also, it no longer complains with a warning message if the home cache cannot be created (it just uses a temporary dir instead). And of course, the release includes multiple bugfixes.

What's new in LuaRocks 3.0.4

• Fork-free platform detection at startup
• Improved detection of the default rockspec in commands such as luarocks test
• Various minor bugfixes

What's new in LuaRocks 3.0.3

LuaRocks 3.0.3 is a minor bugfix release, fixing a regression in luarocks.loader introduced in 3.0.2.

What's new in LuaRocks 3.0.2

• Improvements in luarocks init, new --reset flag
• write_rockspec: --lua-version renamed to --lua-versions
• Improved behavior in module autodetection
• Bugfixes in luarocks show
• Fix upgrade/downgrade when a single rock has clashing module filenames (should fix the issue when downgrading luasec)
• Fix for autodetected external dependencies with non-alphabetic characters (should fix the libstdc++ issue when installing xml)

What's new in LuaRocks 3.0.1

• Numerous bugfixes including:
  • Handle missing global arg
  • Fix umask behavior
  • Do not overwrite paths in format 5.x.y when cleaning up path variables (#868)
  • Do not detect files under lua_modules as part of your sources when running luarocks write_rockspec
  • Windows: do not hardcode MINGW in the all-in-one binary: instead it properly detects when running from a Visual Studio Developer Console and uses that compiler instead
  • configure: --sysconfdir was fixed to its correct meaning: it now defaults to /etc and not /etc/luarocks (/luarocks is appended to the value of sysconfdir)
  • configure: fixed --force-config
• Store Lua location in config file, so that a user can run luarocks init --lua-dir=/my/lua/location and have that location remain active for that project
• Various improvements to the Unix makefile, including $(DESTDIR) support and an uninstall rule
• Autodetect FreeBSD-style include paths (/usr/include/lua5x/)

What's new in LuaRocks 3.0.0

• New rockspec format
• New commands, including luarocks init for per-project workflows
• New flags, including --lua-dir and --lua-version for using multiple Lua installs with a single LuaRocks
• New build system
• General improvements, including namespaces
• User-visible changes, including some breaking changes
• Internal changes

New rockspec format

New rockspec format: if you add rockspec_format = "3.0" to your rockspec, you can use a number of new features. Note that these rockspecs will only work with LuaRocks 3.0 and above, but older versions will detect that directive and fail gracefully, giving the user a message telling them to upgrade. Rockspecs without the rockspec_format directive are interpreted as having format 1.0 (the same format from LuaRocks series 1.x and 2.x) and are still supported.

The following features are only enabled if rockspec_format = "3.0" is set in the rockspec:

• Build type builtin is the default if build.type is not specified.
• The builtin type auto-detects modules using the same heuristics as write_rockspec (for example, if you have a src directory). With auto-detection of the build type and modules, many rockspecs don't even need an explicit build table anymore.
• New table build_dependencies: dependencies used only for running luarocks build but not when installing binary rocks.
• New table test_dependencies: dependencies used only for running luarocks test
• New table test: settings for configuring the behavior of luarocks test. Supports a test.type field so that the test backend can be specified. Currently supported test backends are:
  • "busted", for running Busted
  • "command", for running a plain command.
  • Custom backends can be loaded via test_dependencies
• New field build.macosx_deployment_target = "10.9" is supported in Mac platforms, and adjusts $(CC) and $(LD) variables to export the corresponding environment variable.
• LuaJIT can be detected in dependencies and uses version reported by the running interpreter: e.g. "luajit >= 2.1".
• Auto-detection of source.dir is improved: when the tarball contains only one directory at the root, assume that is where the sources are.
• New description fields:
  • labels, an array of strings;
  • issues_url, URL to the project's bug tracker.
• cmake build type now supports build.build_pass and build_install_pass to disable make passes.
• git fetch type fetches submodules by default.
• Patches added in patches can create and delete files, following standard patch rules.

New commands

• New command: luarocks init. This command performs the setup for using LuaRocks in a "project directory":
  • it creates a lua_modules directory in the current directory for storing rocks
  • it creates a .luarocks/config-5.x.lua local configuration file
  • it creates lua and luarocks wrapper scripts in the current directory that are configured to use lua_modules and .luarocks/config-5.x.lua
  • if there are no rockspecs in the current directory, it creates one based on the directory name and contents.
• New command: luarocks test. It runs a rock's test suite, as specified in the new test section of the rockspec file. It also does some autodetection, so it already works with many existing rocks as well.
• New command: luarocks which. Given the name of an installed, it tells you which rock it is a part of. For example, luarocks which lfs will tell you it is a part of luafilesystem (and give the full path name to the module). In this sense, luarocks which is the dual command to luarocks show.

New flags

• New flags --lua-dir and --lua-version which can be used with all commands. This allows you to specify a Lua version and installation prefix at runtime, so a single LuaRocks installation can be used to manage packages for any Lua version. It is no longer necessary to install separate copies of LuaRocks to manage packages for Lua 5.x and 5.y.
• New flags added to luarocks show: --porcelain, giving a stable script-friendly output (named after the Git --porcelain flag that serves the same purpose) and --rock-license.
• New flag --temp-key for luarocks upload, allowing you to easily upload rocks into an alternate account without disrupting the stored configuration of your main account.
• New flag --dev, for enabling development-branch sub-repositories. This adds support for easily requesting dev modules from LuaRocks.org, as in: luarocks install --dev luafilesystem. The list of URLs configured in rocks_servers is prepended with a list containing "/dev" in their paths.
• luarocks config, when called with no arguments, now displays your entire active configuration, using the same Lua syntax as the configuration file. It is sensitive to the flags given to it (--tree, --lua-dir, etc.) so it presents the resulting configuration produced by loading the currently-active configuration files and the given flags.

New build system

New build system: the configure and Makefile scripts were completely overhauled, making use of LuaRocks 3 features to greatly simplify them:

• Much of the detection and configuration work they performed were moved to runtime, to make LuaRocks more dynamic and resilient to environment changes
• The system-package-manager-friendly mode is still available, as the default target (make, formerly make build).
• The LuaRocks-as-a-rock mode (make bootstrap) is also still available, and was greatly simplified: it no longer uses custom Makefiles: LuaRocks installs itself using luarocks make, and its own rockspec uses the builtin build mode.
• A new build mode: make binary compiles all of LuaRocks into a single executable, bundling various Lua modules to make it self-sufficient, such as LuaFileSystem, LuaSocket and LuaSec.
  • For version 3.0, this will remain as an option, as we evaluate its suitability moving forward to become the default mode of distribution.
  • The goal is to eventually use this mode to produce the Windows version of LuaRocks. We currently include an experimental make windows-binary target which builds a Windows version using the MinGW-w64 cross-compiler on Linux.

General improvements

• New feature: namespaces: you can use luarocks install user/package to install a package from a specific user of the repository.
• Improved defaults for finding external libraries on Linux and Windows.
• Detection of the Lua library and header directories is now done at runtime. This uses the same machinery that LuaRocks employs for external_dependencies in general (with some added logic to cope with the unfortunate rampant inconsistency in naming of Lua libraries and header paths due to lack of upstream standardization).
• luarocks-admin add now works with file:// repositories
• some UI improvements in luarocks list and luarocks search.
• Preliminary support for the upcoming Lua 5.4: LuaRocks is written in the common dialect supporting Lua 5.1-5.3 and LuaJIT, but since a single installation can manage packages for any Lua version now, it can already manage packages for Lua 5.4 even though that's not out yet.

User-visible changes

• Breaking change: The support for deprecated unversioned paths (e.g. /usr/local/lib/luarocks/rocks/ and /etc/luarocks/config.lua) was removed, LuaRocks will now only create and use paths versioned to the specific Lua version in use (e.g. /usr/local/lib/luarocks/rocks-5.3/ and /etc/luarocks/config-5.3.lua).
• Breaking changes: luarocks path now exports versioned variables LUA_PATH_5_x and LUA_CPATH_5_x instead of LUA_PATH and LUA_CPATH when those are in use in your system.
• Package paths are sanitized to only reference the current Lua version. For example, if you have /some/dir/lua/5.1/ in your $LUA_PATH and you are running Lua 5.2, luarocks.loader and the luarocks command-line tool will convert it to /some/dir/lua/5.2/.
• LuaRocks now uses dev instead of scm as the favored version identifier to describe development versions of a rock, aligning it with the terminology used in https://luarocks.org. It still understands scm as a compatibility fallback.
• LuaRocks no longer conflates modules foo and foo.init as being the same in its internal manifest. Instead, the luarocks.loader module is adapted to handle the .init case.
• Wrappers installed using --tree now prepend the tree's prefix to their package paths.
• luarocks-admin commands no longer creates an index.html file in the repository by default (it does update it if it already exists)

Internal changes

• Major improvements in the test suite done by @georgeroman as part of the ongoing Google Summer of Code 2018 program. The coverage improvements and test suite speed-ups have been essential in getting the sprint towards LuaRocks 3.0 more efficient and reliable!
• Modules needed by luarocks.loader were moved below the luarocks.core namespace. Modules in luarocks.core only depend on other luarocks.core modules. (Notably, luarocks.core does not use luarocks.fs.)
• Modules representing luarocks commands were moved into the luarocks.cmd namespace, and luarocks.command_line was renamed to luarocks.cmd. Eventually, all CLI-related code will live under luarocks.cmd, as we move towards a clean CLI-API separation, in preparation for a stable public API.
• Likewise, modules representing luarocks-admin commands were moved into the luarocks.admin.cmd namespace.
• New internal objects for representing interaction with the repostories: luarocks.queries and luarocks.results
• Type checking rules of file formats were moved into the luarocks.type namespace.