LuaRocks Wiki: Installation instructions for Windows

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The LuaRocks package for Windows is an all-in-one package which includes
everything you need to run LuaRocks, including helper binaries and a
Lua interpreter. (You can use your own Lua interpreter if you already have
one installed, see below.)

The package includes an installer script, <tt>INSTALL.BAT</tt>, which provides
a number of options for customizing your installation. Run <tt>INSTALL /?</tt>
for details.

== The default settings ==

The default settings are suitable for installing LuaRocks globally
in your system while allowing both system-wide and per-user sets of rocks.
Non-priviledged accounts will be able to install their own rocks in their
%APPDATA% directory, and administrator accounts can install rocks that
will be available for everyone.

By default LuaRocks will install itself in c:\LuaRocks\''version'', and
will use c:\LuaRocks\config.lua as a default path for the configuration
file. The default system-wide rocks trees is configured as c:\LuaRocks\rocks,
and per-user rocks install at %APPDATA%/luarocks/rocks/.
Command-line scripts provided by rocks will be installed in 
c:\LuaRocks\bin or %APPDATA%/luarocks/bin/, respectively. The user
may then add these directories to their %PATH% variable.

== Making a system-wide repository ==

All paths described above can be overridden with flags in the INSTALL.BAT script,
or entries in the configuration file.

{| cellpadding=5px
| /P ''dir''       || Where to install. Default is c:\LuaRocks\''version''
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /CONFIG ''dir''  || Location where the config file should be installed. Default is c:\LuaRocks
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /TREE ''dir''    || Root of the local tree of installed rocks. Default is c:\LuaRocks
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /SCRIPTS ''dir'' || Where to install scripts installed by rocks. Default is TREE/bin.
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /L               || Install LuaRocks' own copy of Lua even if detected.
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /LUA ''dir''     || Location where Lua is installed - e.g. c:\lua\5.1\
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /INC ''dir''     || Location of Lua includes - e.g. c:\lua\5.1\include
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /LIB ''dir''     || Location of Lua libraries -e.g. c:\lua\5.1\lib
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /BIN ''dir''     || Location of Lua executables - e.g. c:\lua\5.1\bin
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /FORCECONFIG   || Use a single config location. Do not use the LUAROCKS_CONFIG variable or the user's home directory. Useful to avoid conflicts when LuaRocks is embedded within an application.
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| /F             || Remove installation directory if it already exists.
|}

After installation, a default config file called config.lua will be installed at the directory defined by /CONFIG. For further configuration of LuaRocks paths, see the [Config file format].

== Making a self-contained installation ==

Another option is to install LuaRocks in a self-contained manner. This
is an interesting alternative when shipping an application which uses
third-party modules. Bundling them as rocks reduces maintenance overhead
and allows the user to perform updates.

In this scenario, it is not desired to have the user's (or the system's)
configuration affect the self-contained LuaRocks install, in case the 
user or the system also have different LuaRocks installations. For this
reason, the INSTALL.BAT script allows to hardcode the location of a
configuration file. For example, the compilation process of a package
bundling LuaRocks could do something like this:

SET PREFIX=C:\mypackage
 INSTALL /P %PREFIX% /CONFIG %PREFIX%\luarocks

The copy of LuaRocks installed in C:\mypackage will ignore
customization schemes such as the %LUAROCKS_CONFIG% environment variable
and will only use C:\mypackage\luarocks\config.lua.

An interesting option in those cases is for the application to provide
in its configuration file an URL for their own rocks repository, so they
can have control over updates to be performed. Continuing the previous
example, luarocks\config.lua could contain something like this:

repositories = {
    "http://www.mypackage.org/rocks/"
 }

== Picking the Lua interpreter ==

LuaRocks can use its own Lua interpreter provided by the LuaBinaries project,
and will do so by default if it fails to find your Lua installation
automatically. If you want to use your own interpreter, you can pass its path using the /LUA
variable (or /BIN, /LIB and /INC explicitly, if you have a custom directory
structure).

When looking for an interpreter, it will also try to figure out the name of 
the Lua binary (lua.exe, lua5.1.exe). This is set in the <code>lua_interpreter</code>
variable in the configuration file. If you want to use an alternative name to the
interpreter, you can set that variable in your configuration file directly.

== Next steps ==

Once LuaRocks is installed, learn more about [[Using LuaRocks|using LuaRocks]].

----

== Installing over "Lua for Windows" ==

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