LuaRocks- a declarative and extensible package management system for Lua

Abstract. While sometimes dismissed as an operating systems issue, or even a matter of systems administration, module management is deeply linked to programming language design. The main issues are how to instruct the build and runtime environments to find modules and handle their dependencies; how to package modules into redistributable units; how to manage interaction of code written in different languages; and how to map modules to files. These issues are either handled by the language itself or delegated to external tools. Language-specific package managers have risen as a solution to these problems, as they can perform module management portably and in a manner suited to the overall design of the language. This paper presents LuaRocks, a package manager for Lua modules. LuaRocks adopts a declarative approach for specifications using Lua itself as a description language and features an extensible build system that copes with the heterogeneity of the Lua ecosystem