Package Manager

The central feature of lde is the package manager. It allows you to add dependencies to your project and installs them to a folder local to your project which lua’s require() can resolve to.

Adding a dependency

You can add a dependency by adding a field to your lde.json file.

An example list of dependencies:

"dependencies": {
	"hood": { "path": "../hood" },
	"lde-test": { "git": "https://github.com/lde-org/lde" },
}

Git dependencies are cloned with --recurse-submodules, so any submodules in the repository are automatically initialized and checked out.

This can be automated with the lde add command. For git dependencies, do lde add <name> --git <repo> and for local dependencies, do lde add --path <package>.

Git host shorthands accept the owner/repo form directly and expand to the matching host URL, so lde add gh:codebycruz/hood is the same as lde add hood --git https://github.com/codebycruz/hood. Supported: gh:/github: (GitHub), gitlab: (GitLab), and codeberg: (Codeberg). For a package inside a monorepo, the @ form selects it: lde add gh:triangle@codebycruz/hood is the same as lde add triangle --git https://github.com/codebycruz/hood.

Removing a dependency

Simply remove the entry from your lde.json, or use lde remove <name>.

Installing dependencies

Use lde sync to build all of your dependencies into a ./target/ folder inside of your project. It installs from the lockfile when possible, and --locked installs strictly from the lockfile (refusing to drift from it). --production skips dev dependencies.

lde sync
lde sync --locked      # install from the lockfile only
lde sync --production  # skip dev dependencies

If you’re just running a normal Lua project, you can simply use lde run which will configure lua automatically to resolve dependencies from your /target/ directory automatically.

By default, lde run will use the LDE Runtime, which you can read about more on its dedicated page.