LUAENV

Like RVM but for lua. Or vert but soooooooo much cooler*. You can either set your default lua version to something other than what your distribution has set or create local piles that only have specific dependencies installed for development.

A lua env is also called a pile. Because...ya know. It's a pile of rocks. rimshot

Basics

When you use luarocks --local packages get installed under ~/.luarocks. With luaenv you can change that even if you don't want to use an env for a single project only. When setup correctly luaenv creates a new env for each lua version installed under ~/.local/share/luaenv/vanilla/<version>/ that you can switch to easily with luaenv switch <version>. Include that command in your shellrc if you like.

On the other hand you can create a new env to install packages into under ~/.local/share/luaenv/<pile_name>@<version>/ or locally in whatever directory you desire. If there is both a "local" and "global" env the local one will take precedence.

luaenv currently only supports the fish shell

Tools available

luaenv is the core cli tool which gives you access to a variety of functions. It's written entirely in fish which makes it immune to accidentally setting a bad lua path and requires you to have no dependencies besides the shell itself.

Functions available are

• create creates new luaenvs with options
• destroy destroys existing luaenvs
• lua switches to the default env with the provided version
• use uses an existing luaenv
• stop stop using the current env. Is ignored if no env is currently in use
• workon like use but changes into the registered work directory
• ls lists all globally installed envs

Tools like lua, luajit, luarocks, etc are symlinked into the user path in a way that they shadow the system defaults.

Usage

A quick rundown of how to use luaenv. We want to create a pile. You can specify a lua version as well as if you want it to be "global" or "local". Global piles will be installed under ~/.local/share/luaenv/

$ luaenv create -i 5.1 -l env/

When adding -l you also need to add a directory that it will use to store the luaenv. Next up we want to activate the env. Because we created a local env, we need to pass the directory as a parameter

$ luaenv use env/
$ luaenv stop  # This way we could stop using the environment

Now when we call lua -v we will get:

Lua 5.1.5  Copyright (C) 1994-2012 Lua.org, PUC-Rio

Hurray!

So what exactly is the difference to vert? O.ô

• luaenv doesn't clutter your home directory with more .folders. It uses unix standards where things should be stored
• It supports my favourite shell fish a lot better
• It's general design is much closer to RVM than vert which is more based on the principles of python virtualenvs

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* According to me, with no control group or external input. Margin of error is 100%. I don't even know how to do margin of error. Terms and conditions may and will apply.