This section supposed you've already followed the previous note: Setup The Lua Toolchain

Create a new folder new_project that will hold our new project.

$ mkdir new_project
$ cd new_project

Create the src directory

$ mkdir src

Initialize the project with LuaRocks

$ luarocks init --lua-versions "5.3" --no-wrapper-scripts

The project folder has been populated with some files:

$ ls -av
.gitignore
.luarocks
lua_modules
new_project-dev-1.rockspec
src

.gitignore is already setup to ignore ./lua_modules ./.luarocks which are not required into a repository.

LuaRocks installs local or project related modules.

• Local Module: are available for all the project. They are installed into ~/.local/lib
• ⇒ Not covered here: we've already installed local modules by the other note: Setup The Lua Toolchain
• Project Related Modules: are available just for the project. They are installed into the project directory at ./lua_modules

The directory for the project related modules is already available at ./lua_modules, but we still need to tell Lua where is located.

Create a file call src/setup.lua. This file tells to Lua that the project related modules are installed in ./lua_modules

-- src/setup.lua
local version = _VERSION:match("%d+%.%d+")

package.path = 'lua_modules/share/lua/' .. version ..
    '/?.lua;lua_modules/share/lua/' .. version ..
    '/?/init.lua;' .. package.path
package.cpath = 'lua_modules/lib/lua/' .. version ..
    '/?.so;' .. package.cpath

We are almost done. Create the main file src/main.lua

-- src/main.lua
print('Hello!!!')

Run the main script and include the setup file. Note that the setup argument doesn't have the .lua extention:

$ lua -l src/setup src/main.lua

We already have local installed the luaformat module. Custom formatting preferences goes into the file .lua-format located in the project directory. For example, this are some customization:

# .lua-format
keep_simple_control_block_one_line: false
keep_simple_function_one_line: false
column_table_limit: 1

See all the available settings https://github.com/Koihik/LuaFormatter

Let's format the src/main.lua

$ lua-format --in-place src/main.lua

Run the following to check all file in src

$ luacheck src
Checking src/main.lua OK

You can try to add a unused variable the the src/main.lua as the follow:

-- src/main.lua
print('hello!!!')
local int = 1

Run again luacheck:

$ luacheck src
Checking src/main.lua 1 warning
    src/main.lua:3:7: unused variable int

You can configure LuaCheck to be more permissive. LuaCheck settings go to the file .luacheckrc in your project directory.

-- .luacheckrc
allow_defined = true

See all the available settings https://luacheck.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config.html

Install project related modules use LuaRock. For example, let's install the ansicolors module

luarocks install --tree=lua_modules ansicolors

Edit the src/main.lua file as the following:

-- src/main.lua
local colors = require 'ansicolors'
print(colors('%{green}hello'))

Run the main script as following, which include the setup file

lua -l src/setup src/main.lua

When you have a project related module that you want to keep in the repository, you have to configure the LuaRocks Spec file, new_project-dev-1.rockspec. In our example, let's add ansicolors module into the dependencies table:

package = "new_project"
version = "dev-1"
source = {
   url = "*** please add URL for source tarball, zip or repository here ***"
}
description = {
   homepage = "*** please enter a project homepage ***",
   license = "*** please specify a license ***"
}
dependencies = {
   "lua ~> 5.3", -- /!\ it is a list: add a coma here
   "ansicolors"  -- /!\ the ansicolors module
}
build = {
   type = "builtin",
   modules = {}
}

Having the LuaRock spec file configured with dependencies, the project related modules will be installed with the following:

$  luarocks install --deps-only new_project-dev-1.rockspec