Hosting binary rocks

At the moment, LuaRocks.org hosts only rockspecs and src.rock files, and not binary rocks. But you can host your own repository of binary rocks at any static HTTP server (for example, Github Pages).

Suppose you want to host a binary rock for a rock of yours named my_rock:

Step 1: build your rocks with luarocks build my_rock. This will compile your rocks locally in your system. After a successful build, you should see them installed with luarocks list.

Step 2: create binary rocks from using luarocks pack my_rock. This will create a binary rock file, named after your operating system and processor, for example, my_rock-1.0-1-macosx-x86_64.rock. Note that this binary is dependent on library versions of your own machine. This is more of an issue in some operating systems than others (Linux binaries are very picky with library dependencies, so it's helpful to build binaries on older distros for greater compatibility.)

Step 2.5: if your rock has dependencies, repeat step 2 for them as well.

Step 3: create a new directory my_dir, copy your rock binary into it (and possibly your rockspec and src.rock as well, for a nice one-stop-shop of your rock) and run luarocks-admin make-manifest my_dir. This will create files named manifest-* in it, which turn this directory into a working LuaRocks server. You can even use it locally: luarocks install --server=my_dir my_rock should work!

Step 4: upload the contents of my_dir, manifest files and rocks, into a HTTP server and use its URL as the argument of --server. For example, if you uploaded it into http://example.com/binary-rock/manifest-5.3 and http://example.com/binary-rock/my-rock-1.0-1-macosx-x86_64.rock, then using luarocks install --server=http://example.com/binary-rock my_rock should fetch the manifest, read it, find the rock name, download it and install it.

Note that in a repo that contains both binary and source rocks, running luarocks install http://example.com/binary-rock my_rock will download and install the binary rock, and luarocks build http://example.com/binary-rock my_rock will download, compile and install the source rock.