thislight / luabundler

Bundle your Lua porgram and its C dependencies into one executable.

LuaBundler is your escape from the dependency nightmare: it bundles your Lua program and its C dependencies into a single executable.

Why LuaBundler?

• Portable. Requires only the C11 compiler and Lua interpreter.
• C dependencies. LuaBundler can help you bundle the C dependencies.
• Dynamic linking support. LuaBundler doesn't force you to bundle everything. You can choose what you want to bundle.

How it works

Reading from your recipe, LuaBundler will bundle all the Lua files into one .c source file, referencing the open functions (luaopen_*) of the C modules. And LuaBundler can help you compile the file, link (dynamically or statically) the C modules (even the dependencies of the C modules).

You get the executable.

When the executable is started, the LuaBundler runtime creates a new Lua interpreter, injects the bundle module searcher and calls the entry point function. If the code calls require() and the module is not imported, require() will use the searcher to look for bundled modules.

Limitation

• Supported Lua version(s): Lua 5.4
• Versioned C modules are not supported. (which the module name has hyphens, like "a.b.c-v2")

Getting started

• User Manual
• Bootstraping LuaBundler

License

SPDX: Apache-2.0