lua installation

Install Lua in Linux

You can install lua in Linux Mint/Debian/Ubuntu.. You can find all verions of lua here.

wget http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.1.tar.gz
tar zxf lua-5.3.1.tar.gz
cd lua-5.3.1
make linux test

Finally, if test have passed, then install lua into the right place by running sudo make install:

einverne@mint ~/Downloads/lua-5.3.1 $ sudo make install
[sudo] password for einverne:
cd src && mkdir -p /usr/local/bin /usr/local/include /usr/local/lib /usr/local/man/man1 /usr/local/share/lua/5.3 /usr/local/lib/lua/5.3
cd src && install -p -m 0755 lua luac /usr/local/bin
cd src && install -p -m 0644 lua.h luaconf.h lualib.h lauxlib.h lua.hpp /usr/local/include
cd src && install -p -m 0644 liblua.a /usr/local/lib
cd doc && install -p -m 0644 lua.1 luac.1 /usr/local/man/man1

According to the output, we know that lua header files are located under /usr/local/include. And liblua.a lib is located under /usr/local/lib. This two paths may be used later when coding with C/C++. And most important thing executalbe file is located under /usr/local/bin. Most of the Linux distributions are installed lua by default. But most of them don’t have liblua.a installed.

Install Lua on Mac OS X

If you want to build from source code like under linux, just change make linux test into make macosx test. And all the following steps are the same as I mentioned in the Linux section.

If you want a more convenient way to install lua, you can download binary package here. And click next and next to finish installation.Default installation path is same as in Linux.

And id you are using Homebrew just run brew install lua, everything is done.

And you can find more ways to install lua on lua-users.org

For other OS

please see: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaDistributions

Testing Lua

After installation , run lua -v to check the lua version. Test lua by printing “hello world” using following code. Run lua in terminal:

einverne@mint ~ $ lua
Lua 5.3.1  Copyright (C) 1994-2015 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> print "hello world"
hello world

Type Control+D to exit.

lua IDE

If you want to find a lua IDE, I highly recommend Zerobrane Studio. It is cross-platform and support different versions of lua from 5.1 to lastest 5.3. And it has a debugger build-in, which is great for debug lua code from local or remote. It is worth to have a try.