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Awesome Lua

A list about great things for the Lua programming language

From this page : https://github.com/LewisJEllis/awesome-lua

Implementations, Interpreters, and Bindings

• Lua - Lua's original ANSI C interpreter.
  • Lua Repo - The official Lua repo, as seen by the Lua team, mirrored to GitHub.
• LuaJIT - High-performance Just-In-Time compiler for Lua.
• LLVM-Lua - Compiles Lua to LLVM.
• lua.vm.js - Lua VM on the web; a direct port of the C interpreter via LLVM, emscripten, and asm.js.
• Moonshine - A Lua VM implemented in JavaScript. Slower than lua.vm.js, but with better docs, examples, and JS interfacing.
• Fengari - The Lua VM rewritten in Javascript with seamless JS and DOM interoperability.
• MoonSharp - A Lua interpreter written entirely in C# for the .NET, Mono and Unity platforms.
• UniLua - A pure C# implementation of Lua 5.2, focused on compatibility with the Unity game engine.
• lupa - Python bindings to LuaJIT2.
• golua - Golang bindings to the Lua C API.
• GopherLua - Lua 5.1 VM and compiler implemented in Go with Go APIs.
• LuaBridge - A lightweight library for mapping data, functions, and classes back and forth between C++ and Lua.

Note: From LuaJIT to Lua to lua.vm.js to Moonshine, a basic benchmark sees performance drop by roughly a factor of 6 with each hop.

Package Managers

• LuaRocks - De-facto tool for installing Lua modules as packages called "rocks", plus public rock repository and website. Much like npm or pip.

Build Tools and Standalone Makers

• Lake - A build engine written in Lua, similar to Ruby's rake.
• Luabuild - Highly customizable Lua 5.2 build system.
• luastatic - Simple tool for turning Lua programs into standalone executables.
• omnia - A batteries-included creator of standalone executables, built on top of luastatic.

Debugging and Profiling

• ProFi - Simple profiler that works with LuaJIT and produces a report file.
• luatrace - Toolset for tracing/analyzing/profiling script execution and generating detailed reports.
• StackTracePlus - Drop-in upgrade to Lua's stack traces which adds local context and improves readability.
• MobDebug - Powerful remote debugger with breakpoints and stack inspection. Used by ZeroBraneStudio.
• lovebird - Browser-based debug console. Originally made for LÖVE, but works in any project with LuaSocket support.

IDEs and Plugins

• Lua Development Tools - Eclipse plugin which provides code completion, debugging, and more. Built on Metalua.
• Lua for IDEA - IntelliJ IDEA plugin which, among other things, provides code completion, smart highlighting, and experimental debugging.
• ZeroBraneStudio - Lightweight, customizable, cross-platform Lua-dedicated IDE with code completion and analysis, written in Lua. Has broad debugging support for numerous Lua engines.
• BabeLua - Lua editor/debugger extension for VS2012-13 with highlighting, auto-completion, linting, and formatting capabilities.
• lua-mode - Emacs major mode for editing Lua.
• vscode-lua - VSCode intellisense and linting.

Utility Belts

• Lua Fun - High-performance functional programming library designed for LuaJIT.
• Moses - Functional programming utility belt, inspired by Underscore.js.
• Penlight - Broad, heavyweight utility library, inspired by Python's standard libs. Provides the batteries that Lua doesn't.
• lua-stdlib - Middle-weight standard library extension; adds some useful data structures, utility functions, and basic functional stuff.
• Microlight - A little library of useful Lua functions; the 'extra light' version of Penlight.
• compat53 - Compatibility module providing Lua-5.3-style APIs for Lua 5.2 and 5.1.
• RxLua - Reactive Extensions, Observables, etc.

Game Engines

• LÖVE 2D - Desktop game development platform. Cross-platform, feature-complete, well-adopted.
• Corona SDK - Development platform for iOS and Android. Proprietary, but used by numerous top games and apps, totaling over 150 million downloads.
• MOAI - Open source, cross-platform, mobile game development framework. Minimalist C++ engine powered by Lua scripting.
• Drystal - Open source, games can run on Linux or on any platform with a recent web browser.
• Amulet - Open source, audio/visual toolkit suitable for small games and experimentation. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5 and iOS.
• LÖVR - 3D framework for creating virtual reality experiences, inspired by LÖVE 2D.

Game Development

• Corona
  • Coronium - Simple cloud platform supporting analytics, data objects, user management, and more.
• LÖVE
  • awesome-love2d - A list like this one, but focused on game dev and the LÖVE platform.
  • lurker - Shortens the iteration cycle by auto-swapping changed Lua files in a running LÖVE project.
  • HUMP - A set of lightweight helpers for LÖVE; a game-oriented utility belt.
• MOAI
  • moaifiddle - Edit and share short scripts for the MOAI game engine and run them in the browser using WebGL.
• Jumper - Fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use pathfinding library for grid-based games.
• lume - Utility belt library geared toward game development.
• NoobHub - Network multiplayer for Corona, LÖVE, and more, following a simple pub-sub model.
• Collision detection
  • bump.lua - Minimal rectangle-based collision detection which handles tunnelling and basic collision resolution.
  • HardonCollider - Detect collisions between arbitrarily positioned and rotated shapes of any type.
• Tweening
  • flux - A fast, lightweight tweening library for Lua with easing functions and the ability to group tweens together.
  • tween.lua - Small library for tweening, with several easing functions.
• Examples
  • termtris - A tetris clone, written in literate style with "an emphasis on learn-from-ability".
  • PacPac - A Pac-man clone, made with LÖVE.
  • Mari0 - Fusion of Mario and Portal, made with LÖVE. See also its wikipedia entry.
  • Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne - 2D platformer based on Community's Digital Estate Planning episode, made with LÖVE.

Logging

• lua-log - Asynchronous logging library with pluggable writers for file system, network, ZeroMQ, and more.
• LuaLogging - Log4j-inspired logging library supporting various appenders.
• luasyslog - Log to syslog, based on LuaLogging.

Web/Networking Platforms

• OpenResty - A fast and scalable web application platform created by extending Nginx with Lua. Today's de-facto Lua web platform, used heavily by Cloudflare, Taobao, Tencent, and others.
• turbo - Event-driven, non-blocking, LuaJIT-based networking suite and framework, inspired by Tornado.
• Kepler Project - A collection of web-oriented projects using a common set of standards and components.
• Pegasus.lua - Pegasus.lua is a http server to work with web applications written in Lua language.

OpenResty

• awesome-resty - A list like this one, but focused on OpenResty.
• Core platform
  • ngx_lua - The core piece of OpenResty. Embeds Lua in Nginx and exposes, among other things, the cosocket API for non-blocking sockets (compatible with LuaSocket's API).
  • OpenResty GitHub Organization - Home of the repositories for ngx_lua, ngx_openresty, and many related modules.
• Third-party modules
  • lua-resty-http - Lua HTTP client driver, built on the cosocket API.
• Frameworks & tools
  • Lapis - Full-stack framework for Lua and OpenResty. Like the Django or Rails of Lua. Supports Moonscript.
  • ledge - Lua module providing scriptable, RFC-compliant HTTP cache functionality.
  • Sailor — An MVC web framework compatible with OpenResty, Apache and other webservers.
  • Kong - Microservice & API Management Layer.

Search this page for 'OpenResty' to find related packages under other categories (data stores in particular).

Command-line Utilities

• ansicolors - Simple function for printing to the console in color.
• cliargs - A simple command-line argument parsing module.
• lua-term - Terminal operations and manipulations.
• argparse - A feature-rich command line parser inspired by argparse for Python.

Concurrency and Multithreading

• Coroutine-based multitasking:
  • Lumen - Simple concurrent task scheduling.
  • ConcurrentLua - Implements an Erlang-style message-passing concurrency model.
  • cqueues - Library for managing sockets, signals, and threads based on an event loop with coroutines.
• Multithreading:
  • llthreads - A simple wrapper for low-level pthreads & WIN32 threads.
  • llthreads2 - Newer rewrite of llthreads.
  • lanes - Library implementing a message passing model with one OS thread per Lua thread.
  • luaproc - Message-passing model which allows multiple threads per OS thread and easily generalizes across a network. See also the paper where it originated.

For more on the differences (particularly between lanes and luaproc), see this comparison of options; somewhat dated, but covers how each one works and the significant differences.

Templating

• lustache - Mustache template implementation.
• etlua - Embedded Lua templates, ERB-style.
• lua-resty-template - Lua-oriented template engine for OpenResty, somewhat Jinja-like.

Documentation

• LDoc - Documentation generator which modernizes and extends LuaDoc.
• Locco - Lua port of Docco, the "quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator".
• docroc - Parse comments into a Lua table to generate documentation.

Object-oriented Programming

• 30log - Minimalist OOP library with basic classes, inheritance, and mixins in 30 lines.
• middleclass - Simple but robust OOP library with inheritance, methods, metamethods, class variables and mixins.

File system and OS

• LuaFileSystem - Extends and complements Lua's built-in set of file system functions.
• luaposix - Bindings for POSIX APIs, including curses.
• lunix - Bindings to common Unix system APIs, striving for thread-safety.
• lua-path - File system path manipulation library.

Time and Date

• LuaDate - Date and time module with parsing, formatting, addition/subtraction, localization, and ISO 8601 support.
• cron.lua - Time-related functions for Lua, inspired by JavaScript's setTimeout and setInterval.
• luatx - Time, date, and timezone library.

Image Manipulation

• magick - Lua bindings to ImageMagick for LuaJIT using FFI.

Digital Signal Processing

• LuaFFT - An easy to use Fast Fourier Transformation package in pure Lua.
• Worp - Sound/music/DSP engine written for LuaJIT.

Hardware and Embedded Systems

• eLua - Lua, extended with optimizations and specific features for efficient and portable embedded software development.

Math and Scientific Computing

• SciLua - Numerical/scientific computing framework built on LuaJIT, with an interface to R.
• Torch7 - Scientific computing framework with wide support for machine learning algorithms, used by Facebook, Google, and more.
• lhf's Lua Tools - Assorted libraries and tools, many math- or data-related.

Parsing and Serialization

• JSON
  • lua-cjson - Blazing fast JSON encoding/decoding implemented in C and exposed to Lua.
  • luajson - JSON encoder/decoder implemented in Lua on top of LPeg.
  • dkjson - JSON encoder/decoder implemented in pure Lua.
  • json.lua - A fast and tiny JSON library in pure Lua.
• XML
  • LuaExpat - SAX XML parser via binding to the Expat library.
  • SLAXML - Pure Lua SAX-like streaming XML parser.
• MessagePack
  • lua-MessagePack - Pure Lua implementation of MessagePack.
  • lua-cmsgpack - A MessagePack C implementation with Lua bindings, as used by Redis.=
• LPeg
  • LPeg - A pattern-matching library for Lua, based on Parsing Expression Grammars.
  • lpeg_patterns - A collection of LPeg patterns.
  • LuLPeg - A pure Lua implementation of LPeg v0.12.
  • LPegLJ - A pure LuaJIT implementation of LPeg v1.0.
  • LPegLabel - An extension of LPeg adding support for labeled failures.
• lyaml - YAML encoding/decoding via binding to LibYAML.
• lunamark - Converts Markdown to other textual formats including HTML and LaTeX. Uses LPeg for fast parsing.
• LXSH - A collection of lexers and syntax highlighters written with LPeg.
• lua-pb - Protocol Buffers implementation.

Humanize

• i18n.lua - Internationalization library with locales, formatting, and pluralization.
• inspect.lua - Human-readable representation of Lua tables.
• serpent - Serializer and pretty printer.
• Ser - Dead simple serializer with good performance.
• say - Simple string key-value store for i18n.

Compression

• lua-zlib - Simple streaming interface to zlib for gzip/gunzip.
• lua-zip - Lua binding to libzip. Reads and writes zip files.

Cryptography

• LuaCrypto - Lua bindings to OpenSSL.
• lua-lockbox - A collection of cryptographic primitives written in pure Lua.
• luatweetnacl - Bindings to tweetnacl, modern high-security cryptographic library.
• luaossl - "Most comprehensive OpenSSL module in the Lua universe" - used by lapis, kong, and lua-http.

Network

• LuaSocket - Networking extension which provides a socket API for TCP and UDP, and implements HTTP, FTP, and SMTP.
• lua-websockets - WebSocket client and server modules. Webserver-agnostic, implemented in Lua on top of LuaSocket.
• lua-cURLv3 - Lua binding to libcurl.
• lua-http - Asynchronous HTTP and WebSocket library with client and server APIs, TLS, and HTTP/2; based on cqueues.

Data Stores

• LuaSQL - Simple interface for connecting to ODBC, ADO, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite and PostgreSQL.
• pgmoon - Lua PostgreSQL driver for OpenResty, LuaSocket, and cqueues.
• lua-resty-mysql - Lua MySQL driver for OpenResty.
• lua-resty-cassandra - Lua Cassandra client driver for OpenResty and others.
• Redis
  • redis-lua - Pure Lua client library for Redis.
  • lua-resty-redis - Lua Redis client driver for OpenResty.
  • lredis - Asynchronous Redis client with pipelining and Pub/Sub support; based on cqueues.

Message Brokers

• lua-zmq - Lua bindings to ZeroMQ.
• lzmq - A newer Lua binding to ZeroMQ.
• lua-resty-kafka - Kafka client driver based on OpenResty cosockets.
• lua-resty-rabbitmqstomp - RabbitMQ client library based on OpenResty cosockets.

Testing

• busted - BDD-style unit testing framework with great docs and Moonscript support.
• telescope - Flexible and highly customizable testing library.
• luassert - Assertion library extending Lua's built-in assertions.
• lust - Minimal test framework.

Foreign Function Interfaces

• LuaJIT FFI - LuaJIT's mechanism for calling external C functions and using C data structures from pure Lua code.
• luaffi - Standalone FFI library, compatible with the LuaJIT FFI interface.

Analysis Tools and ASTs

• luadec51 - Lua Decompiler for Lua version 5.1.
• luacov - Simple coverage analyzer, used by busted and telescope for checking test coverage.
  • luacov-coveralls - LuaCov reporter for coveralls.io.
• luacheck - Simple static analyzer which detects accidental globals and undefined or shadowed locals.
• Metalua - Pure Lua parser and compiler, used for generating ASTs. A number of other tools make use of the Metalua parser in this way.
• LuaInspect - Lua's most powerful code analysis and linting tool, built on Metalua. Used by ZeroBraneStudio, among others.
• LuaMinify - Minifier which also brings its own static analysis tools, lexer, and parser.
• Typed Lua - A typed superset of Lua that compiles to plain Lua.
• lua-parser - A Lua 5.3 parser written using LPegLabel, with improved error messages.

Experimental, etc

• punchdrunk.js - Moonshine + LÖVE API reimplementation = run LÖVE games in the browser.
• luvit - Node.js's underlying architecture (libUV) with Lua on top instead of JavaScript.
• graphql-lua - Lua implementation of GraphQL.

Scriptable by Lua

• luakit - Fast, small, webkit based browser framework extensible by Lua.
• Hammerspoon - A powerful, extensible OS X automation tool. A community-maintained fork of Mjolnir.
• kpie - A scripting utility to juggle windows.
• lumail - A console-based mail client, with extensive scripting capabilities.
• AwesomeWM - A highly configurable and extensible window manager for X, scripted and configured by Lua.
• Textadept - Extremely lightweight, customizable, cross-platform editor, written (mostly) in (and scripted by) Lua.
• KoReader - An ebook reader application supports PDF, DJVU, EPUB, FB2 and much more, running on Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook and Android devices.

Miscellaneous

• MoonScript - Moonscript is a dynamic scripting language that compiles to Lua. It reduces verbosity and provides a rich set of features like comprehensions and classes. Its author calls it 'CoffeeScript for Lua'.
• sitegen - A static site generator which uses MoonScript and supports HTML and Markdown, page grouping, and plugins.

Resources

Community

• lua-l - The official Lua mailing list, and one of the focal points of the Lua community.
• Lua.Space - The Lua community blog.
• Lua Users Foundation - An association of individuals with the mission of supporting and promoting Lua and its community and ecosystems.
• lua-users.org - A site for and by users of Lua, featuring an IRC channel, a web archive of lua-l, and a large wiki.
• Conferences/Meetups
  • Lua Workshop - Annual 2-day meeting of the Lua community, in rotating locations.
  • Lua Conf - Annual 1-day Lua conference in Brazil.
  • FOSDEM - Annual 2-day gathering of F/OSS developers in Brussels which sometimes has a "Lua devroom".

References

• Reference Manual - The official definition of the Lua language.
• lua-users wiki - A large community-maintained collection of Lua information and resources, supplementing the official website.
• Lua Unofficial FAQ - Answers all sorts of Lua-related questions, including many of the form 'How to ___?'.

Glossaries

• Lua 5.3 Glossary - A glossary of some essential Lua terms.

Style Guides

• Lua-users style guide - A general, high-level style guide; unopinionated, easily agreed on.
• Olivine style guide - A more opinionated and specific, and therefore more rigorous, guide.

Tutorials

• Lua Crash Course - Short crash course readover, or reference for when you forget the basics.
• Learn Lua in 15 Minutes - A well-commented example file which covers the basics.
• Learning Lua from JS - An overview of the similarities and differences between Lua and JS; a great start for JavaScript folks looking to pick up Lua.
• lua-users tutorial - In-depth collection of tutorials aimed at newcomers.
• Lua Missions - A series of 'Missions' to work through which are designed to teach aspects of Lua along the way.
• Creating an Image Server - Walks through setting up and using OpenResty to build a simple image processing server; a great starting point for playing with OpenResty.

Articles

• Embedding Lua in C - An introductory walkthrough of embedding Lua in a C program. A bit dated, but still a great walkthrough.
• Lua: Good, bad, and ugly parts - A thorough summary of the good, different, bad, and ugly aspects of Lua, including many subtle quirks, by the author of ZeroBraneStudio.
• Lua states, libraries, coroutines and memory - Diagrams and explains some more advanced concepts of the Lua VM, particularly when interfacing with C.

Talks & Slides

• Roberto's Talks - History of talks given by Lua's chief architect, with slides for each.
• Lua Workshop Talks - High-quality talks are given at each ~annual Lua Workshop, and a history of them is online, slides included.

Books

• Programming in Lua - The authoritative intro to all aspects of Lua programming, written by Lua's chief architect. Three editions released; first edition available online.
• Lua Quick Reference - A quick reference on how to program in and embed Lua 5.1 through 5.3, by the creator of Textadept.
• Programming Gems - A collection of articles covering existing wisdom and practices on programming well in Lua, in a broad variety of use cases.
• Lua Programming - A shorter overview of the language, up to date for Lua 5.2, and available online.

Other Lists

• awesome-resty - A list like this one, but focused on OpenResty.
• awesome-love2d - A list like this one, but focused on game dev and the LÖVE platform.
• Where Lua is Used - A comprehensive list of stand-alone programs written in or extensible using Lua.