lua-pack

lua-pack is an advanced lua bundler similar to webpack made for lua 5.1+ written in js that makes working on large scale projects easy and fast. it takes all the files in your project and packs them into a single production ready file.

usage

to define a module in your project the first line must be like the following.

_NAME = "module name here";

return { whatever = true };

to load that module in any other source file you can just call the load function

local module = load("module name here");
print(module.whatever);

initialize project

to start your project start by making a new folder which will contain all your lua files then open a terminal in that folder and run

luapack init

it will first ask for what the name of the project and then for which of the files is going to be the entry/main file and then go through all the options for you to select.

building project

you can build your project in two different ways directly building it and serving it to a webserver.

build

by running the following, it will output the build into a newly created folder inside your project folder

luapack build

serve

serving the project will allow for hot updating the build every time a script is changed and host that build on your localhost to allow easy testing of your code.

luapack serve

after running the command it will build your script and put it on the first open port it can find on your localhost, from then on every time you make a change or add a source file it will create a new build and update the site

features

lua-pack has many unique features to make your life easier.

file importing and relative paths

you can easily import any file and interact between the files in your project.

relative file paths

luapack allows you to use relative file paths when loading modules and importing files. let's say you are want to load a module name by file name in the same directory you can do something like the following.

local module = load('./module.lua') -- load file via relative path
local module2 = load('../folder/module2.lua') -- load file from up a directory

relative paths can be disabled. when relative paths are disabled file based paths are relative to the project folder instead of the current file. to disabled them change "enableRelativePaths" in your luapack.config.json file to false

importing files

all files in the project folder are automatically bundled into the project for ease of use. let's say your file structure looks like the following :

project
|-folder
| |-sample.txt
| `-test.json
`-main.lua

to load both files from inside of main.lua all you have to dos

local sampleTxt = import('./folder/sample.txt')
local testJson  = import('./folder/test.json') -- json files are automatically converted to lua tables on compilation so you can directly index them after importing

prelude

adding the "prelude" variable to your config file will put the selected file before the modules get loaded in the package.

string literal caching

if enabled, repeated use of the same string literals will cause the bundler to automatically localize them to save on storage space

print("test")
local b = "test"
local c = "test"

-- string literal caching enabled
local a = "test"
print(a)
local b = a
local c = a

instruction optimization

when enabled, any large repetition of instructions will automatically be put in a for loop in the output

print("test")
print("test")
print("test")
print("test")

-- instruction optimization enabled
for i = 1, 4 do
    print("test")
end

installation

installing pre-built release

1. download the .zip file from the releases page
2. unpack that .zip file to any folder on your computer
3. add that folder to your windows PATH (tutorial)

building from source

must have node.js installed

1. open cmd

2. install pkg

    npm i -g pkg

3. open the source folder

4. install the node modules

   npm i

5. run the build script

   npm run build

6. add that folder to your windows PATH (tutorial)