About this site

LuaRocks.org is a community run rock and rockspec hosting service for Lua modules. It provides an easy way to upload rocks and rockspecs compatible with the LuaRocks package manager.

Anyone can join and upload a Lua module. Modules are places in manifests, centralized lists of packages that LuaRocks can install from.

The root manifest is the global manifest on LuaRocks.org. It’s a single namespace containing all the packages that can be installed right from LuaRocks with no additional configuration. In addition to the root manifest, all accounts have their own manifests with modules uploaded by the account, and anyone can create a custom manifest for organizing collections of modules.

More About Rockspecs & Rocks

Throughout the lifetime of a module, there will probably be multiple versions created. Each version gets its own .rockspec file. A file containing the version number, metadata and build instructions.

Optionally, many .rock files may be built for a single rockspec. A rock is a zip file containing the rockspec and all files needed to install the module. Some rocks may be built for a specific platform (Linux, OSX, Windows, etc). The platform of a rock is identified by its filename.

For example, the following rockspec may result in the following rocks:

• enet-1.0-0.rockspec
  • enet-1.0-0.src.rock
  • enet-1.0-0.win32-x86.rock

LuaRocks.org is a website for hosting all of these kinds of files.

Some module versions may be marked as development. These versions are placed in a development version of their regular manifest so they won’t be installed by default. This site will automatically identify a module version as development by it’s name. The owner of the module can override the classification if it was miscategorized.

How LuaRocks Works

When you tell LuaRocks to install a package you typically do something like this:

$ luarocks install enet

LuaRocks will download a manifest from each of the manifest servers it has been configured to look at. A manifest is a list of modules that a server has available. You can see the LuaRocks root manifest by going to: https://luarocks.org/manifest. It will then try to find the module you searched for that best matches your platform and the version you want (the most recent by default).

After finding the right match, it will ask the server with that module for either a .rock or .rockspec which is needed to install locally. For example, if our search was using LuaRocks.org, it might find this .rockspec if no rocks were available: https://luarocks.org/enet-1.0-0.rockspec

After downloading the right file, LuaRocks will then perform the installation and the module is ready for use.

How This Site Is Built

This site is written in MoonScript using the Lapis framework. You can find the source on GitHub.