Installing Use the live demo to play with Lua if you don't want to install anything on your computer. To run Lua programs on your computer, you'll need a standalone Lua interpreter and perhaps some additional Lua libraries. Use your favorite text editor to write your Lua programs. Make sure to save your programs as plain text. If you want an IDE, try ZeroBrane Studio. If you use Windows, try LuaDist, 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 5.4.0). 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 and follow the instructions in the package. Here is a simple terminal session that downloads the current release of Lua and builds it in a Linux system: curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.4.0.tar.gz tar zxf lua-5.4.0.tar.gz cd lua-5.4.0 make all test If you don't have curl, try wget. If you use Windows and want to build Lua from source, there are detailed instructions in the wiki. Embedding To embed Lua into your C or C++ program, you'll need the Lua headers to compile your program and a 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, just download Lua and add its source directory to your project.