Welcome!

Lua is a powerful and fast programming languagethat is easy to learn and use and to embed into your application.

Lua is designed to be a lightweight embeddable scripting language.It is used forall sorts of applications,from games to web applications and image processing.

See theabout pagefor detailsand some reasons why you should choose Lua.

See what Lua programs look and feel like in thelive demo.

Learning

A good place to start learning Lua is the bookProgramming in Lua,available inpaperback and as ane-book.The first edition is freely available online.See alsocourse notesbased on this book.

The official definition of the Lua language is given in thereference manual.

See thedocumentation pageand thewikifor more.

Getting help

Ourcommunityis friendly and will most probably help you if you need.Just visitthe mailing list,the chat room,andstackoverflow.

If you need help in Portuguese,join theLua BR mailing listand visitpt.stackoverflow.

See alsotheFAQ,the community-maintainedwikiandLuaFaq,and the much longeruFAQ.

Tools

If you need tocomplement the standard Lua libraries to handle more complex tasks,visitLuaRocks,the main repository of Lua modules.See alsoAwesome Lua,a curated list of quality Lua packages and resources.Thelua-users wikilists manyuser-contributed addonsfor Lua.

Supporting

You can help tosupport the Lua projectbybuying a bookpublished by Lua.organd bymaking a donation.

You can also help to spread the word about Lua by buying Lua productsatZazzle.

Installing

Use thelive demoto play with Luaif you don't want to install anything on your computer.

To run Lua programs on your computer,you'll need a standalone Lua interpreterand perhaps some additional Lua libraries.Pre-compiled Lua libraries and executables are available atLuaBinaries.Use your favorite text editor to write your Lua programs.Make sure to save your programs as plain text.If you want an IDE, tryZeroBrane Studio.

If you use Windows,tryLuaDist,a multi-platform distribution of the Lua that includes batteries.

If you use Linux or Mac OS X,Lua is either already installed on your system or there is a Lua package for it.Make sure you get the latest release of Lua(currently 5.4.3).

Lua is also quite easy to build from source,as explained below.

Building from source

Lua is very easy to build and install.Just download it andfollow theinstructionsin the package.

Here is a simple terminal session thatdownloads the current release of Lua and builds it in a Linux system:If you don't have curl, try wget.

If you use Windows and want to build Lua from source,there aredetailed instructionsin thewiki.

Embedding

To embed Lua into your C or C++ program,you'll need the Lua headers to compile your program anda Lua library to link with it.If you're getting a ready-made Lua package for your platform,you'll probably need the development package as well.Otherwise, justdownload Lua andadd its source directory to your project.