It's an exciting day at Cloudsmith HQ, today we're launching beta support for hosted private LuaRocks module repositories.

Created in Brazil in the early 90s, Lua is a lightweight language, designed primarily for embedding into other applications. Lua has a focus on speed, portability and extensibility, making it the perfect choice in many situations. Lua works equally well on all major platforms, whether you prefer Linux, Mac or Windows.

LuaRocks is the package manager for Lua. LuaRocks is responsible for downloading, building and installing dependencies, known as Rocks. The primary source of open-source LuaRocks is the official LuaRocks module repository. LuaRocks.org is a community-run hosting service for Lua modules and provides a valuable resource which is central to the Lua ecosystem. Anyone can upload Rocks for distribution, either in the main repository or in a per-user repository which is provided by the service.

Whilst LuaRocks.org is the main repository for rocks, LuaRocks provides all the necessary tooling and configuration flags to easily allow pointing at another repository if needed. Cloudsmith, as of today, can provide an alternative repository for hosting your rocks as needed.

There are a number of great reasons you may wish to run your own private repository:

To develop Lua modules internally and share them privately to other teams.

To distribute and deploy your own Lua modules in a pipeline at your org.

To distribute Lua modules as vendored software (i.e. maybe commercially).

To make modifications to public Lua modules, without republishing publicly.

To mirror public Lua modules, to isolate from uncontrolled upstream issues.

To capture the exact state of your dependencies at a particular version/release.

To control (whitelist/blacklist) the exact Lua modules allowed for your org.

To keep track of the exact versions/releases of Lua modules you have/use.

If you're interested in the possibilities that hosting your own rocks brings, then Cloudsmith is here for you. Sign up today to begin hosting and distributing your Lua modules at the world's first hosted private Lua modules repository service.

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Getting started

Getting started with Cloudsmith and LuaRocks couldn't be simpler. First, you'll need a Cloudsmith account and a repository to which you can upload your modules.

If you need to install Lua and LuaRocks you can find instructions on the Lua website and the LuaRocks wiki.

Cloudsmith should work with all supported versions of LuaRocks, but we reccomend using at least version 3.0 or later for the best experience. You can check your local version like so: