Note: You must use version 8 or greater as GitHub has deprecated older versions of the actions core libraries.

Builds and installs Lua into the .lua/ directory in the working directory. Adds the .lua/bin to the PATH environment variable so lua can be called directly in workflows.

Other Lua GitHub actions:

• leafo/gh-actions-luarocks
  • inputs: luarocksVersion

Install Lua: (Will typically default to the latest release, 5.5.0 as of this readme)

- uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@v13

Install specific version of Lua:

- uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@v13
  with:
    luaVersion: "5.1.5"

Install specific version of LuaJIT:

- uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@v13
  with:
    luaVersion: "luajit-2.1"

When using Windows the following prerequisite action must be run before building Lua: step-security/msvc-dev-cmd@v1. It is safe to include this line on non-Windows platforms, as the action will do nothing in those cases.

- uses: step-security/msvc-dev-cmd@v1
- uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@v13

Default: "5.5"

Specifies the version of Lua to install. The version name instructs the action where to download the source from.

Examples of versions:

• "5.1.5"
• "5.2.4"
• "5.3.6"
• "5.4.8"
• "5.5.0"
• "luajit-2.0"
• "luajit-2.1"
• "luajit-master"
• "luajit-openresty"

The version specifies where the source is downloaded from:

• luajit-openresty — will always pull master from https://github.com/openresty/luajit2
• Anything else starting with luajit- — pulls a master or version branch from https://github.com/luajit/luajit
• Anything else — from https://lua.org/ftp/

Version aliases

You can use shorthand 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, luajit version aliases to point to the latest (or recent) version of Lua for that version.

Default: ""

Additional flags to pass to make when building Lua.

Example value:

- uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@master
  with:
    luaVersion: 5.3
    luaCompileFlags: LUA_CFLAGS="-DLUA_INT_TYPE=LUA_INT_INT"

Note that compile flags may work differently across Lua and LuaJIT.

This example is for running tests on a Lua module that uses LuaRocks for dependencies and busted for a test suite.

Create .github/workflows/test.yml in your repository:

name: test

on: [push]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v7

    - uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@v13
      with:
        luaVersion: "5.1.5"

    - uses: leafo/gh-actions-luarocks@v6

    - name: build
      run: |
        luarocks install busted
        luarocks make

    - name: test
      run: |
        busted -o utfTerminal

This example:

• Uses Lua 5.1.5 — You can use another version by changing the luaVersion variable. LuaJIT versions can be used by prefixing the version with luajit-, i.e. luajit-2.1
• Uses a .rockspec file in the root directory of your repository to install dependencies and test packaging the module via luarocks make

View the documentation for the individual actions (linked above) to learn more about how they work.

You can test against multiple versions of Lua using a matrix strategy:

jobs:
  test:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        luaVersion: ["5.1.5", "5.2.4", "luajit-2.1"]

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v7
    - uses: leafo/gh-actions-lua@v13
      with:
        luaVersion: ${{ matrix.luaVersion }}

    # ...