Lua

Lua is a scripting language which is simple and quite easy to learn. It’s used in games like World of Warcraft and Minetest, and software like Wireshark and MediaWiki.

LuaRocks is the package manager for Lua to install modules. But it’s difficult to set up on Windows, compared to on Unix. Its ecosystem is smaller compared to ones for other languages, and any issues are more difficult to debug; which is why I’d advocate for using Python instead of Lua.

I personally use Lua for generating LuaLS annotations for a WoW VS Code extension which needs to load the Blizzard_APIDocumentation Lua files.

Install

This guide is for setting up Lua 5.4 64-bit. Note that Lua has no installer, you just get the available Windows binaries. We also need MinGW for Windows to be able to install LuaRocks modules.

Requirements:

Notes

  • Either static (vc17) or dynamic (dll17) Lua libraries can be used, the only thing we need is the include folder from it and to move that into our Lua folder, e.g. lua-5.4.2_Win64_bin/include.
  • This requires installing PowerShell 7 and changing the execution policy; please do this at your own risk. 
    Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

This PowerShell script tries to automate the setup steps, but I suggest going through it step for step in case of any errors.

# your work directory
$base = "D:/Dev"

# https://sourceforge.net/projects/luabinaries/files/5.4.2/Tools%20Executables/ -> lua-5.4.2_Win64_bin.zip
# https://sourceforge.net/projects/luabinaries/files/5.4.2/Windows%20Libraries/Static/ -> lua-5.4.2_Win64_vc17_lib.zip
$lua = "$base/lua-5.4.2_Win64_bin"
# https://github.com/luarocks/luarocks/wiki/Download
$luarocks = "$base/luarocks-3.11.1-windows-64"
# https://winlibs.com/ -> GCC 14.2.0 (with POSIX threads) + LLVM/Clang/LLD/LLDB 18.1.8 + MinGW-w64 12.0.0 UCRT - release 1
$mingw = "$base/winlibs-x86_64-posix-seh-gcc-14.2.0-llvm-18.1.8-mingw-w64ucrt-12.0.0-r1\mingw64\bin"
# https://curl.se/windows/ (no longer available)
$openssl = "$base/openssl-3.0.2-win64-mingw\bin"

# add to windows path
$env:path = $env:path + ($lua, $luarocks, $mingw, $openssl -join ";")
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path, [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

# set luarocks path
setx -m LUA_PATH "$luarocks\lua\?.lua;$luarocks\lua\?\init.lua;$luarocks\?.lua;$luarocks\?\init.lua;$luarocks\..\share\lua\5.4\?.lua;$luarocks\..\share\lua\5.4\?\init.lua;.\?.lua;.\?\init.lua;$env:APPDATA/luarocks/share/lua/5.4/?.lua;$env:APPDATA/luarocks/share/lua/5.4/?/init.lua"
setx -m LUA_CPATH "$luarocks\?.dll;$luarocks\..\lib\lua\5.4\?.dll;$luarocks\loadall.dll;.\?.dll;$env:APPDATA/luarocks/lib/lua/5.4/?.dll"

# create luarocks config
New-Item -Force -Path "$env:APPDATA/luarocks" -Name "config-5.4.lua" -Value "
variables.LUA_DIR = '$lua'
--variables.LUA_BINDIR = '$lua'
variables.LUA_INCDIR = '$lua/include'
variables.LUA_LIBDIR = '$lua'"

luarocks install luafilesystem
luarocks install lua-path
luarocks install luasocket
luarocks install luasec OPENSSL_DIR=$openssl
luarocks install xml2lua
luarocks install lua-cjson
luarocks install gumbo
luarocks install csv

Issues

PowerShell script

There is a caveat with this script I haven’t solved. Any user variables (vs system varables) also show up in the path so they get duplicated. You will need to delete them afterwards from the system variables.

$env:path = $env:path + ($lua, $luarocks, $mingw, $openssl -join ";")
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path, [System.EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

For example these paths would show up twice in the system variables.

LuaSocket

The latest LuaSocket version scm-3 has an issue on Windows.

Until the pull request has been merged you will need to download the rockspec, apply the patch to the rockspec and install it manually.

luarocks install .\luasocket-scm-3.rockspec

Testing

This should print the html contents of a website.

local https = require "ssl.https"

local url = "https://www.google.com/"
local body = https.request(url)
print(body)