Overview

Lua Built-In program (L-Bia) is a self-running Lua interpreter. It turns your Lua program with all required modules (either Lua or C libraries) and an interpreter into a single stand-alone program.

L-Bia makes the things simpler. First because you don't need to distribute may files. Last because you can run the resulting program directly, in any computer from any media (flopies, CD-ROMs, USB sticks or other), without installing it or have any prior software installed.

Availability

L-Bia is freely available under the terms of GNU General Public License. Contrary to popular belief, it can be used in comercial software! See LICENSE for details. The latest version of L-Bia can be downloaded from its LuaForge page.

Build and Install

If you're using the usual Unix tools, in most cases you can just type make. This will compile everything with the default options. To change the options, modify or include C/C++ user code edit Makefile and/or lbconf.h.

If you're on Windows or other systems without the usual Unix tools, then the instructions for building L-Bia depend on the compiler you use. You'll need to create projects (or whatever your compiler uses) for building the library (lbaux.dll on Windows) and the program (l-bia.exe on Windows), as follows:

library: lbaux.c minilzo.c

program: l-bia.c minilzo.c

Then run l-bia on l-bia this way: lua l-bia.lua -i program l-bia.lua.

As L-Bia uses L-Bia, it needs no installation at all. You don't need library any more. The only file needed to use the program is l-bia executable (l-bia.exe on Windows). If you want to "install" L-Bia on the system, just copy it to a system PATH directory.

How do I use it?

Just type l-bia hello.lua for each program you want to turn into a stand-alone program. It will create a hello executable (hello.exe on Windows) ready to use. Of course you can use any name instead of hello.

If your script uses modules, you must run L-Bia for main script only. L-Bia automatically search for all require'd modules and include then. There is no need for l-bia *.lua.

The command-line arguments passed to your stand-alone program will be available in a table called "arg" and also as "...".

Type l-bia with no arguments, to see a list of command-line options and a brief help about it.

Thanks

Thanks to Waldemar Celes and Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo, the autors of Lua, for portions of code I used in L-Bia. Tanks also to Markus Franz Xaver Johannes Oberhumer for miniLZO - mini subset of the LZO real-time data compression library.