Awesome Lua 
Inspired by the lists awesome, awesome-awesomeness, and awesome-nodejs.
Lua
GitHub repository ↗ synced 2026/8/9
Awesome Lua
Packages
Resources
Implementations, Interpreters, and Bindings
Lua
Lua's original ANSI C interpreter.
LuaJIT
High-performance Just-In-Time compiler for Lua.
LLVM-Lua
Compiles Lua to LLVM.
lua.vm.js
Lua VM on the web; a direct port of the C interpreter via LLVM, emscripten, and asm.js.
Moonshine
A Lua VM implemented in JavaScript. Slower than lua.vm.js, but with better docs, examples, and JS interfacing.
Fengari
The Lua VM rewritten in Javascript with seamless JS and DOM interoperability.
MoonSharp
A Lua interpreter written entirely in C# for the .NET, Mono and Unity platforms.
UniLua
A pure C# implementation of Lua 5.2, focused on compatibility with the Unity game engine.
lupa
Python bindings to LuaJIT2.
golua
Golang bindings to the Lua C API.
GopherLua
Lua 5.1 VM and compiler implemented in Go with Go APIs.
LuaBridge
A lightweight library for mapping data, functions, and classes back and forth between C++ and Lua.
- Lua Repo - The official Lua repo, as seen by the Lua team, mirrored to GitHub.
Note: From LuaJIT to Lua to lua.vm.js to Moonshine, a basic benchmark sees performance drop by roughly a factor of 6 with each hop.
Package Managers
LuaRocks
De-facto tool for installing Lua modules as packages called "rocks", plus public rock repository and website. Much like npm or pip.
Build Tools and Standalone Makers
Lake
A build engine written in Lua, similar to Ruby's rake.
Luabuild
Highly customizable Lua 5.2 build system.
luastatic
Simple tool for turning Lua programs into standalone executables.
omnia
A batteries-included creator of standalone executables, built on top of luastatic.
Debugging and Profiling
ProFi
Simple profiler that works with LuaJIT and produces a report file.
luatrace
Toolset for tracing/analyzing/profiling script execution and generating detailed reports.
StackTracePlus
Drop-in upgrade to Lua's stack traces which adds local context and improves readability.
MobDebug
Powerful remote debugger with breakpoints and stack inspection. Used by ZeroBraneStudio.
lovebird
Browser-based debug console. Originally made for LÖVE, but works in any project with LuaSocket support.
IDEs and Plugins
Lua Development Tools
Eclipse plugin which provides code completion, debugging, and more. Built on Metalua.
Lua for IDEA
IntelliJ IDEA plugin which, among other things, provides code completion, smart highlighting, and experimental debugging.
ZeroBraneStudio
Lightweight, customizable, cross-platform Lua-dedicated IDE with code completion and analysis, written in Lua. Has broad debugging support for numerous Lua engines.
BabeLua
Lua editor/debugger extension for VS2012-13 with highlighting, auto-completion, linting, and formatting capabilities.
lua-mode
Emacs major mode for editing Lua.
vscode-lua
VSCode intellisense and linting.
Utility Belts
Lua Fun
High-performance functional programming library designed for LuaJIT.
Moses
Functional programming utility belt, inspired by Underscore.js.
Penlight
Broad, heavyweight utility library, inspired by Python's standard libs. Provides the batteries that Lua doesn't.
lua-stdlib
Middle-weight standard library extension; adds some useful data structures, utility functions, and basic functional stuff.
Microlight
A little library of useful Lua functions; the 'extra light' version of Penlight.
compat53
Compatibility module providing Lua-5.3-style APIs for Lua 5.2 and 5.1.
RxLua
Reactive Extensions, Observables, etc.
Game Engines
LÖVE 2D
Desktop game development platform. Cross-platform, feature-complete, well-adopted.
Corona SDK
Development platform for iOS and Android. Proprietary, but used by numerous top games and apps, totaling over 150 million downloads.
MOAI
Open source, cross-platform, mobile game development framework. Minimalist C++ engine powered by Lua scripting.
Drystal
Open source, games can run on Linux or on any platform with a recent web browser.
Amulet
Open source, audio/visual toolkit suitable for small games and experimentation. It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5 and iOS.
LÖVR
3D framework for creating virtual reality experiences, inspired by LÖVE 2D.
Game Development
Jumper
Fast, lightweight, and easy-to-use pathfinding library for grid-based games.
lume
Utility belt library geared toward game development.
NoobHub
Network multiplayer for Corona, LÖVE, and more, following a simple pub-sub model.
- Corona
- Coronium - Simple cloud platform supporting analytics, data objects, user management, and more.
- LÖVE
- awesome-love2d - A list like this one, but focused on game dev and the LÖVE platform.
- lurker - Shortens the iteration cycle by auto-swapping changed Lua files in a running LÖVE project.
- HUMP - A set of lightweight helpers for LÖVE; a game-oriented utility belt.
- MOAI
- moaifiddle - Edit and share short scripts for the MOAI game engine and run them in the browser using WebGL.
- Collision detection
- bump.lua - Minimal rectangle-based collision detection which handles tunnelling and basic collision resolution.
- HardonCollider - Detect collisions between arbitrarily positioned and rotated shapes of any type.
- Tweening
- Examples
- termtris - A tetris clone, written in literate style with "an emphasis on learn-from-ability".
- PacPac - A Pac-man clone, made with LÖVE.
- Mari0 - Fusion of Mario and Portal, made with LÖVE. See also its wikipedia entry.
- Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne - 2D platformer based on Community's Digital Estate Planning episode, made with LÖVE.
Logging
lua-log
Asynchronous logging library with pluggable writers for file system, network, ZeroMQ, and more.
LuaLogging
Log4j-inspired logging library supporting various appenders.
luasyslog
Log to syslog, based on LuaLogging.
Web/Networking Platforms
OpenResty
A fast and scalable web application platform created by extending Nginx with Lua. Today's de-facto Lua web platform, used heavily by Cloudflare, Taobao, Tencent, and others.
turbo
Event-driven, non-blocking, LuaJIT-based networking suite and framework, inspired by Tornado.
Kepler Project
A collection of web-oriented projects using a common set of standards and components.
Pegasus.lua
Pegasus.lua is a http server to work with web applications written in Lua language.
OpenResty
awesome-resty
A list like this one, but focused on OpenResty.
- Core platform
- ngx_lua - The core piece of OpenResty. Embeds Lua in Nginx and exposes, among other things, the cosocket API for non-blocking sockets (compatible with LuaSocket's API).
- OpenResty GitHub Organization - Home of the repositories for ngx_lua, ngx_openresty, and many related modules.
- Third-party modules
- lua-resty-http - Lua HTTP client driver, built on the cosocket API.
- Frameworks & tools
- Lapis - Full-stack framework for Lua and OpenResty. Like the Django or Rails of Lua. Supports Moonscript.
- ledge - Lua module providing scriptable, RFC-compliant HTTP cache functionality.
- Sailor — An MVC web framework compatible with OpenResty, Apache and other webservers.
- Kong - Microservice & API Management Layer.
Search this page for 'OpenResty' to find related packages under other categories (data stores in particular).
Command-line Utilities
ansicolors
Simple function for printing to the console in color.
cliargs
A simple command-line argument parsing module.
lua-term
Terminal operations and manipulations.
argparse
A feature-rich command line parser inspired by argparse for Python.
Concurrency and Multithreading
- Coroutine-based multitasking:
- Lumen - Simple concurrent task scheduling.
- ConcurrentLua - Implements an Erlang-style message-passing concurrency model.
- cqueues - Library for managing sockets, signals, and threads based on an event loop with coroutines.
- Multithreading:
- llthreads - A simple wrapper for low-level pthreads & WIN32 threads.
- llthreads2 - Newer rewrite of llthreads.
- lanes - Library implementing a message passing model with one OS thread per Lua thread.
- luaproc - Message-passing model which allows multiple threads per OS thread and easily generalizes across a network. See also the paper where it originated.
For more on the differences (particularly between lanes and luaproc), see this comparison of options; somewhat dated, but covers how each one works and the significant differences.
Templating
lustache
Mustache template implementation.
etlua
Embedded Lua templates, ERB-style.
lua-resty-template
Lua-oriented template engine for OpenResty, somewhat Jinja-like.
Documentation
LDoc
Documentation generator which modernizes and extends [LuaDoc](http://keplerproject.github.io/luadoc/).
Locco
Lua port of [Docco](http://ashkenas.com/docco/), the "quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator".
docroc
Parse comments into a Lua table to generate documentation.
Object-oriented Programming
30log
Minimalist OOP library with basic classes, inheritance, and mixins in 30 lines.
middleclass
Simple but robust OOP library with inheritance, methods, metamethods, class variables and mixins.
File system and OS
LuaFileSystem
Extends and complements Lua's built-in set of file system functions.
luaposix
Bindings for POSIX APIs, including curses.
lunix
Bindings to common Unix system APIs, striving for thread-safety.
lua-path
File system path manipulation library.
Time and Date
LuaDate
Date and time module with parsing, formatting, addition/subtraction, localization, and ISO 8601 support.
cron.lua
Time-related functions for Lua, inspired by JavaScript's setTimeout and setInterval.
luatx
Time, date, and timezone library.
Image Manipulation
magick
Lua bindings to ImageMagick for LuaJIT using FFI.
Digital Signal Processing
LuaFFT
An easy to use Fast Fourier Transformation package in pure Lua.
Worp
Sound/music/DSP engine written for LuaJIT.
Hardware and Embedded Systems
eLua
Lua, extended with optimizations and specific features for efficient and portable embedded software development.
Math and Scientific Computing
SciLua
Numerical/scientific computing framework built on LuaJIT, with an interface to R.
Torch7
Scientific computing framework with wide support for machine learning algorithms, used by Facebook, Google, and more.
lhf's Lua Tools
Assorted libraries and tools, many math- or data-related.
Parsing and Serialization
lyaml
YAML encoding/decoding via binding to LibYAML.
lunamark
Converts Markdown to other textual formats including HTML and LaTeX. Uses LPeg for fast parsing.
LXSH
A collection of lexers and syntax highlighters written with LPeg.
lua-pb
Protocol Buffers implementation.
- JSON
- XML
- MessagePack
- lua-MessagePack - Pure Lua implementation of MessagePack.
- lua-cmsgpack - A MessagePack C implementation with Lua bindings, as used by Redis.=
- LPeg
- LPeg - A pattern-matching library for Lua, based on Parsing Expression Grammars.
- lpeg_patterns - A collection of LPeg patterns.
- LuLPeg - A pure Lua implementation of LPeg v0.12.
- LPegLJ - A pure LuaJIT implementation of LPeg v1.0.
- LPegLabel - An extension of LPeg adding support for labeled failures.
Humanize
i18n.lua
Internationalization library with locales, formatting, and pluralization.
inspect.lua
Human-readable representation of Lua tables.
serpent
Serializer and pretty printer.
Ser
Dead simple serializer with good performance.
say
Simple string key-value store for i18n.
Compression
lua-zlib
Simple streaming interface to zlib for gzip/gunzip.
lua-zip
Lua binding to libzip. Reads and writes zip files.
Cryptography
LuaCrypto
Lua bindings to OpenSSL.
lua-lockbox
A collection of cryptographic primitives written in pure Lua.
luatweetnacl
Bindings to tweetnacl, modern high-security cryptographic library.
luaossl
"Most comprehensive OpenSSL module in the Lua universe" - used by lapis, kong, and lua-http.
Network
LuaSocket
Networking extension which provides a socket API for TCP and UDP, and implements HTTP, FTP, and SMTP.
lua-websockets
WebSocket client and server modules. Webserver-agnostic, implemented in Lua on top of LuaSocket.
lua-cURLv3
Lua binding to libcurl.
lua-http
Asynchronous HTTP and WebSocket library with client and server APIs, TLS, and HTTP/2; based on cqueues.
Data Stores
LuaSQL
Simple interface for connecting to ODBC, ADO, Oracle, MySQL, SQLite and PostgreSQL.
pgmoon
Lua PostgreSQL driver for OpenResty, LuaSocket, and cqueues.
lua-resty-mysql
Lua MySQL driver for OpenResty.
lua-resty-cassandra
Lua Cassandra client driver for OpenResty and others.
- Redis
- redis-lua - Pure Lua client library for Redis.
- lua-resty-redis - Lua Redis client driver for OpenResty.
- lredis - Asynchronous Redis client with pipelining and Pub/Sub support; based on cqueues.
Message Brokers
lua-zmq
Lua bindings to ZeroMQ.
lzmq
A newer Lua binding to ZeroMQ.
lua-resty-kafka
Kafka client driver based on OpenResty cosockets.
lua-resty-rabbitmqstomp
RabbitMQ client library based on OpenResty cosockets.
Testing
busted
BDD-style unit testing framework with great docs and Moonscript support.
telescope
Flexible and highly customizable testing library.
luassert
Assertion library extending Lua's built-in assertions.
lust
Minimal test framework.
Foreign Function Interfaces
LuaJIT FFI
LuaJIT's mechanism for calling external C functions and using C data structures from pure Lua code.
luaffi
Standalone FFI library, compatible with the LuaJIT FFI interface.
Analysis Tools and ASTs
luadec51
Lua Decompiler for Lua version 5.1.
luacov
Simple coverage analyzer, used by busted and telescope for checking test coverage.
luacheck
Simple static analyzer which detects accidental globals and undefined or shadowed locals.
Metalua
Pure Lua parser and compiler, used for generating ASTs. A number of other tools make use of the Metalua parser in this way.
LuaInspect
Lua's most powerful code analysis and linting tool, built on Metalua. Used by ZeroBraneStudio, among others.
LuaMinify
Minifier which also brings its own static analysis tools, lexer, and parser.
Typed Lua
A typed superset of Lua that compiles to plain Lua.
lua-parser
A Lua 5.3 parser written using LPegLabel, with improved error messages.
- luacov-coveralls - LuaCov reporter for coveralls.io.
Experimental, etc
punchdrunk.js
Moonshine + LÖVE API reimplementation = run LÖVE games in the browser.
luvit
Node.js's underlying architecture (libUV) with Lua on top instead of JavaScript.
graphql-lua
Lua implementation of [GraphQL](http://graphql.org/).
Scriptable by Lua
luakit
Fast, small, webkit based browser framework extensible by Lua.
Hammerspoon
A powerful, extensible OS X automation tool. A community-maintained fork of [Mjolnir](http://www.mjolnir.io/).
kpie
A scripting utility to juggle windows.
lumail
A console-based mail client, with extensive scripting capabilities.
AwesomeWM
A highly configurable and extensible window manager for X, scripted and configured by Lua.
Textadept
Extremely lightweight, customizable, cross-platform editor, written (mostly) in (and scripted by) Lua.
KoReader
An ebook reader application supports PDF, DJVU, EPUB, FB2 and much more, running on Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook and Android devices.
Miscellaneous
MoonScript
Moonscript is a dynamic scripting language that compiles to Lua. It reduces verbosity and provides a rich set of features like comprehensions and classes. Its author calls it 'CoffeeScript for Lua'.
sitegen
A static site generator which uses MoonScript and supports HTML and Markdown, page grouping, and plugins.
Resources
Community
lua-l
The official Lua mailing list, and one of the focal points of the Lua community.
Lua.Space
The Lua community blog.
Lua Users Foundation
An association of individuals with the mission of supporting and promoting Lua and its community and ecosystems.
lua-users.org
A site for and by users of Lua, featuring an IRC channel, a web archive of lua-l, and a large wiki.
- Conferences/Meetups
- Lua Workshop - Annual 2-day meeting of the Lua community, in rotating locations.
- Lua Conf - Annual 1-day Lua conference in Brazil.
- FOSDEM - Annual 2-day gathering of F/OSS developers in Brussels which sometimes has a "Lua devroom".
References
Reference Manual
The official definition of the Lua language.
lua-users wiki
A large community-maintained collection of Lua information and resources, supplementing the official website.
Lua Unofficial FAQ
Answers all sorts of Lua-related questions, including many of the form 'How to ___?'.
Glossaries
Lua 5.3 Glossary
A glossary of some essential Lua terms.
Style Guides
Lua-users style guide
A general, high-level style guide; unopinionated, easily agreed on.
Olivine style guide
A more opinionated and specific, and therefore more rigorous, guide.
Tutorials
Lua Crash Course
Short crash course readover, or reference for when you forget the basics.
Learn Lua in 15 Minutes
A well-commented example file which covers the basics.
Learning Lua from JS
An overview of the similarities and differences between Lua and JS; a great start for JavaScript folks looking to pick up Lua.
lua-users tutorial
In-depth collection of tutorials aimed at newcomers.
Lua Missions
A series of 'Missions' to work through which are designed to teach aspects of Lua along the way.
Creating an Image Server
Walks through setting up and using OpenResty to build a simple image processing server; a great starting point for playing with OpenResty.
Articles
Embedding Lua in C
An introductory walkthrough of embedding Lua in a C program. A bit dated, but still a great walkthrough.
Lua: Good, bad, and ugly parts
A thorough summary of the good, different, bad, and ugly aspects of Lua, including many subtle quirks, by the author of ZeroBraneStudio.
Lua states, libraries, coroutines and memory
Diagrams and explains some more advanced concepts of the Lua VM, particularly when interfacing with C.
Talks & Slides
Roberto's Talks
History of talks given by Lua's chief architect, with slides for each.
Lua Workshop Talks
High-quality talks are given at each ~annual Lua Workshop, and a history of them is online, slides included.
Books
Programming in Lua
The authoritative intro to all aspects of Lua programming, written by Lua's chief architect. Three editions released; first edition available online.
Lua Quick Reference
A quick reference on how to program in and embed Lua 5.1 through 5.3, by the creator of Textadept.
Programming Gems
A collection of articles covering existing wisdom and practices on programming well in Lua, in a broad variety of use cases.
Lua Programming
A shorter overview of the language, up to date for Lua 5.2, and available online.
Other Lists
awesome-resty
A list like this one, but focused on OpenResty.
awesome-love2d
A list like this one, but focused on game dev and the LÖVE platform.
Where Lua is Used
A comprehensive list of stand-alone programs written in or extensible using Lua.