Introduction

LDE is a package manager, runtime, test runner and bundler for Lua. It ships as a single executable with LuaJIT bundled in for you.

The days of fiddling with Lua and Luarocks setups are over. Provide users a single binary without dependencies of your project with a simple lde compile!

Getting Started

Create a new project with lde new ./myproject (or lde init).

lde new myproject && cd myproject
echo "print('Hello, world!')" > ./src/init.lua

Adding Dependencies

Add dependencies with a simple lde add which supports git, registry and luarocks dependencies all in one!

Dependencies are resolved locally to your project for easy access to lua without polluting your PATH, or needing some kind of virtual environment.

lde add hood --git https://github.com/codebycruz/hood
lde add rocks:luasocket

Running Your Project

LDE ships with a runtime. You can run your project’s entrypoint with lde run. To use an external lua engine like Lua 5.4, see this article.

lde run
# 'Hello, world!' is printed to the console

Running Lua Tools

Run any remote tool easily with ldx!

ldx cowsay hi

 ----
< hi >
 ----
       \   ^__^
        \  (oo)\_______
           (__)\       )\/\
               ||----w |
               ||     ||

Test Your Code

LDE can test your code with lde test. LDE ships a minimal built-in test framework, required as lde-test, which accompanies the default test executor which simply runs every file inside of your tests folder.

local test = require('lde-test')

test.it("should add numbers", function()
	test.equal(2, 2)
end)

test.it("should not be equal", function()
	test.notEqual(2, 3)
end)

Compile Your Code

LDE can compile your code into a single executable. Users don’t need any dependencies to run your project, just run lde compile and go!

Next Steps

Head to Installation to get lde on your machine, or jump straight to the Quick Start if you’ve already installed it.