reluax lets you easily create dynamic websites in a custom dialect of Lua,
inspired by JSX. The service has been written in Rust, and uses luajit as
its Lua runtime for performance and ease of integration of other libraries.
luajit
Currently, the project is only supported on Linux and MacOS.
Reluax is available through GitHub releases as a prebuilt binary, or
from crates.io through cargo install reluax, if you have the Rust
toolchain installed. Alternatively, it is packaged as a Nix flake:
if you have Nix installed, you can nix run github:Duckonaut/reluax.
Commands:
serve Serve a directory of LuaX files in production mode
build Build a directory of LuaX files
dev Serve a directory of LuaX files in development mode
new Create a new project
init Initialize a new project in the current directory
help Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)
Options:
-h, --help Print help
Examples:
reluax serve
reluax serve --port 4000
reluax dev -P public/ -C luax/
To create an example project, run reluax new my-first-project.
The project was heavily inspired by Ben Visness' blog post, I made JSX for Lua (because I hate static sites), which I highly recommend reading.
A Reluax project is very simple. Reluax expects to run a directory of files,
with the entry point being reluax.luax or reluax.lua. This module needs
to return a table containing the member function route, and optionally a
project name under the key name. For code examples, check the
examples directory.
The route function will be called with the path and, optionally, method and
body of a request, and can return a variety of responses, by returning two
values: the status code, and the response body.
The response body will usually be a table, and by default will be treated as a HTML
page (see example/basic/). It can be optionally wrapped using the functions
reluax.html or reluax.json, the first of which will make sure the HTML is returned
as is, without a <!DOCTYPE html> tag, and the second returning the table as a JSON
object.
With this you can build a rather powerful backend, handling templating, routing, and anything else through LuaX code.
The reluax global table contains several utility functions, described below:
reluax.json: wrap the table to be interpreted as a JSON response,reluax.html_page: wrap the table to be interpreted as a full HTML page (default behavior),reluax.html: wrap the table to be interpreted as a HTML excerpt (for e.g. use with htmx),reluax.path_matches: check if a path string matches the template,reluax.path_extract: extract named path parameters from the path.