Lua equivalent of virtualenv? [closed]

Question

Is there something like python's virtualenv in lua?

So I can install all required lua modules/rocks in a sandboxed environment. This is good for test, since I will not mess up with system-wide lua modules or another lua project's environment.

luarocks looks promising since its support of self-contained installation. But I'm interested that if there is some tool like virtualenv which automates the creation, maintenance and switch of sandboxed environments.

Answer 1

It should be fairly simple to switch between Lua installs by setting the LUA_PATH environment variable. Quoting this page from the Lua documentation:

To determine its path, require first checks the global variable LUA_PATH. If the value of LUA_PATH is a string, that string is the path. Otherwise, require checks the environment variable LUA_PATH.

[...]

The components in a path are separated by semicolons (a character seldom used for file names in most operating systems). For instance, if the path is

?;?.lua;c:\windows\?;/usr/local/lua/?/?.lua

then the call require"lili" will try to open the following files:

lili
lili.lua
c:\windows\lili
/usr/local/lua/lili/lili.lua

Answer 2

Have you tried LuaDist?

It solves exactly this issue by using so called 'deployments' - it is a single directory in which all dependencies and libraries (and even Lua interpreter) are installed, independent of the whole system.