How Do I Install Lua on MacOS?

Question

I just downloaded Lua from the official website.

I want to install it on my Mac but I have no clue how. And I've never tried using Mac to install and use compilers other then (xcode , titanium , corona) so easy on me please :)

I tried this link but it does not work.

Also Is there a fully guided on how to install and start using Lua on mac? Because all I see is windows :S

note: Before I asked this question I searched on SOV but I could not find my answer.

Solution 1

Compiling from source code is not that painful.

Lua 5.1.4 here: http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.1.4.tar.gz Lua 5.2 alpha here: http://www.lua.org/work/lua-5.2.0-alpha.tar.gz

Take Lua 5.2 as example:

1. Open your Terminal.app
2. wget http://www.lua.org/work/lua-5.3.0-work3.tar.gz
3. tar xvzf lua-5.3.0-work3.tar.gz
4. cd lua-5.3.0-work3/src
5. make macosx(I believe you have Xcode installed)

After that, you can see 'lua' binary under current dir.

sudo cp lua /usr/bin/lua

Now you can enter lua to have a try. :)

Solution 2

This Wiki has few listing: http://lua-users.org/wiki/MacOsxLua

If you use Homebrew (https://brew.sh/), just type:

brew update
brew install lua

Solution 3

If you have brew installed, just try:

brew install lua

Solution 4

You just follow this guide on http://www.lua.org/start.html:

Fire up your terminal and type in:

curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.5.tar.gz
tar zxf lua-5.3.5.tar.gz
cd lua-5.3.5
make macosx test
make install

You can even combine the last two steps to

make macosx install

After that I could just type in

lua

into my terminal and something like:

Lua 5.3.5  Copyright (C) 1994-2018 Lua.org, PUC-Rio

should appear. This means that lua is installed correctly.

Solution 5

With MacPorts:

sudo port install lua

View more solutions

Comments

[JUST MY correct OPINION]

When you say you tried that link and it "does not work", you forgot to mention what, precisely, "did not work". There are about a billion ways (conservatively guessing) for software to "not work". We need a bit more information than that to diagnose the problem.

[Mohammad Fadin]

Thanks so much. After I entered this command sudo cp lua /usr/bin/lua it asked me for a password. I entered my machine pass but it didn't work. can you help ? :S

[lhf]

See also lua.org/faq.html#1.1 Change linux to macosx and after building do make install.

[Mohammad Fadin]

Thanks. I successfully managed to run the compiler. I will get back whenever I have trouble Thanks @lht and @Prajna

[M.W. Felker]

Thanks for this, worked! Anyone who wants to know, the lua file you need to copy is found under your current dir /src/lua

[rafaelmorais]

To make this possible I had to change /usr/bin/lua to /usr/local/bin/lua and it works fine.

[jknight]

Every guide I've read misses the cp step. its pretty hard to notice that theres a lua bin in there now. The lua binary was in the src directory for me. Also you should install to usr/local/bin

[Dang_Ho]

should copy to /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin