Publishing Our CLI Application

In this chapter, we'll learn how to publish our CLI application to luarocks.org so it can be used by others.

API Key

To publish a rock, you need an API key. You can find your API key by logging into your account on luarocks.org and navigating to the API Key settings.

From here, you can create a new API key or use an existing one. Here's an example of what the API key should look like:

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Security

Keep your API key safe and secure. It's like a password and should not be shared with anyone. The key we showed above is an example and not a real key.

Creating a Repository

As we mentioned in the previous chapters, a rockspec is a set of instructions on how to build and install a rock. One of the fields in our lux.toml, which isn't provided by default, is the URL source field, which points to the location of the rock's source code.

When publishing a rock, we need to ensure that the source.url field points to such a location, this is usually a GitHub repository. If you haven't already made one, this is a good time to create a repository for your project.

Apart from creating the repository, you must also create a release for the code you published, along with a version number. Navigate to your Github repository and press "Create new release" on the right sidebar. Afterwards, create a release named v0.1.0.

Then press "Publish release". On your Github repository page, you should now see a release tagged v0.1.0!

Adding a Source URL

Here's our updated lux.toml with the source.url field added:

lux.toml

package = "my-lua-project"
version = "0.1.0"
lua = ">=5.1"

[description]
summary = "A sample project."
maintainer = "vhyrro"
license = "MIT"
labels = [ "learning" ]

[source]
url = "https://github.com/my-username/my-lua-project"
tag = "v0.1.0"

[dependencies]
argparse = "=0.7"

[build]
type = "builtin"

Publishing

With the API key in hand, we can now publish our rock. Run the following command in your project directory:

LUX_API_KEY=your-api-key lx upload

Lux will now package your project and upload it to luarocks! Feel free to check out the luarocks.org website to see your project listed in the "Recent Modules" section.

Congratulations! 🎉

You have just successfully published your first Lua package! Well done. If you'd like to learn more about Lux, feel free to take a look at our guides.