A lua compilation tool for making a single lua library file from a complex source of multiple files and dependencies.

I made lots of little lua libraries while making projects in LOVE. I always use these to start a project so I pushed them out into their own things, and lots of time they depend on each other. I also wanted each library to be a single .lua file, but that makes it messy to develop. Thus LMAKE was born.

LMAKE is a command line tool that will take a lua library directory with an appropriate lib.toml file and compile it into a single library file. It does this using the lua package.preload table to inject sub files into the "requires table" so everything can easily be placed into one file with minimal editing on LMAKE's part.

Current supported features

• Create a single lua file from multiple source files.

Future Supported features

• Include external requirements / dependencies
• Download and manage external requirements / dependencies from online
• Download and manage libraries from online.

Just make a lua only library. Then make a lib.toml to define it. Here is the simplest lib.toml

name = "stringtools"
user = "snsvrno"
author = "snsvrno <[email protected]>"
version = "1.2.1"

[requires]
_ = "src.tools"

The first section is just the information for the library. The listed above are all required.

Name: Required, The library name

User: Required, The user or group that "owns" the library

Author: Required, The username and email of the primary contact for the library

Version: Required, The library's version

Upstream: Optional, the url to a git repository that houses the project.

The next section is where you define all source files that make up your library, and where to load them.

_ = "src.tools"
other = "src.othertools"

Here we are loading the contents of the src.tools file into the root library file, so the resulting library file will then have all the functions such that src.tools.AFUNCTION == library.AFUNCTION.

You can also load files into other parts of the main library. src.othertools.BFUNCTION == library.other.BFUNCTION

The simplest is to just be in the library directory and run lmake compile.

lmake compile .

This will create a new folder bin and compile the resulting library there.

There is no testing built into lmake currenty, but I recommend writing unittests and test the compiled library to make sure everything is working and interacting as expected.

Here is what a compiled library would look like.

package.preload['stringtools-253614172587266203315807'] = (function(...)
  local TOOLS = { }

  function TOOLS.split(string,delim)
    -- code here
  end

  function TOOLS.remove(string,characters)
    -- code here
  end

  function TOOLS.removeLeading(string,characters)
    -- code here
  end

  return TOOLS
end)

local library = require ("stringtools-253614172587266203315807")
library.name = 'stringtools'
library.user = 'snsvrno'
library.author = 'snsvrno <[email protected]>'
library.version = '1.2.1'
return library

Where the src.tools would be

local TOOLS = { }

function TOOLS.split(string,delim)
  -- code here
end

function TOOLS.remove(string,characters)
  -- code here
end

function TOOLS.removeLeading(string,characters)
  -- code here
end

return TOOLS