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:
wXnNFASnbacLCkgSzKb6t9cLSmNcO3ZV9mIaxrPK
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.
Adding a Source URL
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.
Here's our updated lux.toml with the source.url field added:
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"
[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.