Hello, world! It’s been a while since I last made a blog post. In the next set of blog posts, I’ll hope to catch you entirely up to speed with rocks’s development cycle.
Speaking of which, rocks is no longer called rocks. And we have a new mascot!
The upcoming posts will be written in retrospect, meaning that most of the features are done already, but I’m pacing the devlogs as if they were happening in realtime. It should make for a much more pleasant reading experience for future readers!
A new Identity
In order to prevent confusion, we’ve decided to rename rocks to Lux! Instead of running rocks [...] commands in your terminal, you will now be running lx [...] commands instead :)
From here on, I will call the project Lux, and will not refer to the old name. The older blog posts, as well as the URLs for these posts, will still use the name rocks for backwards compatibility, so
others’ links on the web don’t break.
lx check
We’ve added a new command for ensuring your Lua code is clean and correct. lx check downloads the latest version of luacheck and runs it on your codebase, printing out any warnings or errors.
Feel free to also set up a Git hook to run this code on every commit, see how here!
Project Lockfiles
We spent a while trying to figure out the most effective strategy to implement these. Lux now supports lockfiles for projects, as opposed to just lockfiles for rocktrees.
You’ll be able to see it
as a lux.lock in your project directories! These are simple JSON files which describe the current state of all dependencies in your project, making your environment fully reproducible across various systems.
lx uninstall / lx doc
In our hunt to reimplement all the major functionality from luarocks, we’ve implemented the uninstall and doc commands. Uninstall is different to lx remove, since lx remove removes dependencies of the current
project, whereas lx uninstall operates on the global rocktree.
lx doc is a fancy way of displaying documentation for any rock out there, feel free to try it out.
Leftover Binaries
I’ve finally fixed a long-standing issue related to installed Lua binaries. As you may or may not know, packages on luarocks.org can ship their own binaries. We have supported this for a while now,
but we never associated the binaries with the rock that produced it.
This meant that uninstalling a rock never uninstalled its binary, since we had no way of tracking it.
Now, we implemented a new binaries field into the lockfile, which tracks what rock produces which binaries. Upon removal of a rock, the binary will now also be yeeted :)
Big Things Ahead
Next up, I’d like to work on an incredibly bold and big feature. Currently, we support a project.rockspec file as the default Lux project file. However, rockspec files are very unwieldy and impossible
to modify properly because of the turing completeness of Lua.
Instead, I’d like to migrate us to a new lux.toml file, which will supercede project.rockspec in hopes of making things much simpler
for the average user. TOML is easy to read and write, and also to remember.
This will be a big shift in what command we’ll be able to implement in the future, exciting things ahead!