Installation

Before starting to write any Lua we need to have an environment where we can run it. Naturally Civ VI and many other games come with a Lua interpreter built in but working with them can be slow, especially if wanting to educate or try abstract concepts.

Getting an Interpreter (Windows)

We are going to install a standalone Lua interpreter so that we can execute Lua locally on our machines in isolation.

Assuming we are on Windows head over to the GitHub repo and install luaforwindows this is a

'batteries included environment' for the Lua scripting language on Windows.

• Homepage
• Releases

Hello World

With our local Lua interpreter installed open up your editor of choice, I recommend Visual Studio Code with the Lua plugin installed:

Name: Lua

Id: sumneko.lua

Description: Lua Language Server coded by Lua

Version: 1.0.4

Publisher: sumneko

VS Marketplace Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=sumneko.lua

Create a new file in your location of choice and call it helloWorld.lua and paste the following

---

--- Simple Hello World Example to test the Lua Interpreter

---

print("Hello World")

Now run the file by opening a Command Prompt window in the folder and typing

lua.exe helloWorld.lua

We should see Hello World printed to the screen.

Right Click Run

As we don't always want to open a command prompt window install the code runner plugin and restart VS Code

Name: Code Runner

Id: formulahendry.code-runner

Description: Run C, C++, Java, JS, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Go, Lua, Groovy, PowerShell, CMD, BASH, F#, C#, VBScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Scala, Swift, Julia, Crystal, OCaml, R, AppleScript, Elixir, VB.NET, Clojure, Haxe, Obj-C, Rust, Racket, Scheme, AutoHotkey, AutoIt, Kotlin, Dart, Pascal, Haskell, Nim,

Version: 0.11.1

Publisher: Jun Han

VS Marketplace Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=formulahendry.code-runner

You should now be able to run lua files from the right click menu

Next

We will dig into some core aspects of the language, again if anything is not making sense or not covered in enough detail try looking at the corresponding section in https://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html