Installing lapis on linux mint (alongside lua 5.3)

Question

A few days ago I had a few problems while installing trying to install lapis on my new installation of linux mint. The main problem was that I wanted to have lua 5.3 as the main lua interpreter on my system, but lapis only works with lua 5.1.

Answer 1

This is how I ended up installing it

Note: Instructions for normal installation process, with aditional lua 5.3 being optional

Prerequisites

First of all install all the prerequisites with apt-get install libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev libpcre3-dev libssl-dev perl make build-essential*. This is all you should need to install lua, luarocks and openresty.

_{* copied from openresty website}

Lua Interpreter(s)

Next, go to https://www.lua.org/versions.html and download the latest version of lua5.1 (wget https://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.1.5.tar.gz). Then extract the downloaded file tar -xf lua-5.1.5.tar.gz and optionally rename the directory mv lua-5.1.5 lua51.

Now you can simply build and install lua by moving to the directory cd lua51 and running make make linux and sudo make install

Aditionally, you might want to have lua5.3 installed on your system as the main lua interpreter. Luarocks doesn't seem to particularly like this kind of setup though, so I recommend the following:

First download and extract (and optionally rename) both lua5.1 and lua 5.3; go to the lua 5.1 directory and open Makefile in a text editor; Edit lines 12-15 to install lua in another directory. For me it worked to just add /lua51 to INSTALL_TOP (line 12). Next go to line 44 and change the names of the binaries (I chose lua51 and luac51), optionally do the same with the man pages (this requires also changing them in the doc subdirectory).

The next step is to go to the src/ directory and edit the makefile there as well: in lines 32 and 35 change the names as you did in the previous makefile (lua51 and luac51 in my case).

After this you can just make linux and sudo make install as described above.

Luarocks

Now you need to install luarocks on your system. Start by downloading the latest release of luarocks (http://keplerproject.github.io/luarocks/releases/) and extract it. Again, you can rename it to luarocks/ reduce typing. cd to the directory you just extracted and run ./condigure.

If you changed the lua installation path, you will have give some parameters to the configure script: For lua 5.1 ./configure --lua-version=5.1 --with-lua=/usr/local/lua51 --lua-suffix=51 is how I had to do it (--lua-suffix is what I added to lua and luac and --with-lua tells it where the bin, lib, etc. subdirectories are; only relevant if you changed INSTALL_TOP in the makefile)

Optionally you can now proceed to (download, ) build and install lua 5.3 with its standard configuration. After that you can even go back to the luarocks directory and repeat ./configure, make build and make install and it should automatically install itself with lua 5.3 and leave the installation for lua5.1 intact**.

_{** the luarocks executable is actually just a symlink to luarocks-VERSION (where VERSION can be 5.1, 5.3, etc.) in the same directory. Each time you install luarocks this link is overwritten to point to the latest installation, but the other executables are still there.}

OpenResty

The next step is to install OpenResty: open http://openresty.org/en/installation.html and check the prerequisite section. It should say the same as at the beginning of this answer. If not, install any missing package now. You can also just follow the installation instructions there, but I will be repeating it anyway; go to http://openresty.org/en/download.html and download the latest version. Extract the downloaded archives (and rename the new directory to simply openresty). cd to the new directory and run ./configure --with-pcre-jit --with-ipv6 (this might take a while), make (this might take an even longer while) and sudo make install.

At this point everything except lapis itself should be set up and working.

Lapis

To install lapis, type sudo lurocks install lapis (user luarocks-5.1** instead if you have installed more than one version of it).

Congratulations! If you got no errors, you should now have lapis installed and ready to use :)

_{** see section Luarocks.}