Porting From LuaRocks

For the intended lde experience, you may intend to port your project to lde, to publish it on the registry, or for better performance.

Doing so is relatively straightforward.

File Structure

By default, LuaRocks allows you to arbitrarily define require() paths for each individual file. This means that lde needs to do more work to copy these files to specific locations for your package to work.

By contrast, lde requires all files to be in a ./src/ directory, and requires are based on the file path relative to the src path of a package.

Example: If your package is named dominator, and you have a file ./src/foo/qux.lua, then you’ll need to require("dominator.foo.qux") to access that file both in your own package and in other packages that depend on it.

Native Modules

LuaRocks supports building projects with tools like make, cmake, etc out of the box (well, provided you have the necessary tools installed).

But this comes with the burden of specifically providing configurations for each different tool and platform. A simpler approach is used for lde.

Build Scripts

build.lua scripts are instead used by lde. They define how your package should be built with a clean api to programmatically run a C compiler, run shell scripts and download files. Everything your script writes lands in ./target/<dependency name>/*.

For example, this can be as simple as a build:sh("make") followed by a build:copy of your output binary into the output directory. Paths passed to build:sh and build:cc are relative to the package directory, so use the build.outDir field to target the output.

For more info, read about Native Module Support.