What are the necessary files?

[pandasoli]

After fixing some errors and managing to correctly compile lua-language-server I executed bin/lua-language-server and it works, but when coping this single executable to ~/.local/bin it stops working and give this error:

./lua-language-server: cannot open (bootstrap.lua): No such file or directory

I tried coping the whole bin folder to ~/.local/bin and when running lua-language-server it shows:

./lua-language-server: (bootstrap.lua):85: cannot open ~/.local/bin/main.lua: No such file or directory
stack traceback:
	[C]: in function 'assert'
	(bootstrap.lua):85: in main chunk
	[C]: in ?

If I move main.lua one directory back into ~/.local/bin it comes back to the first error.

What is the right way of install it? Running directly from the source folder doesn't seem like a good approach

[hinell]

The right sequence of commands to build lls under Linux systems is following (run from project's root):

./3rd/luamake/luamake build bootstrap lua-language-server
./3rd/luamake/luamake build copy_bootstrap copy_lua-language-server

$ ls ./bin/
lua-language-server  main.lua

The code above basically builds and copies lls to bin/ folder and then copies make/bootstrap.lua to bin/main.lua. The latter actually pulls up files located in ./script/, so if you want to install it locally to $HOME/.local/bin/, you have to copy scripts folder as well.

There is probably ENVIRONMENT var that allows you to specify path to runtime script/ folder instead, but I didn't dig it up.

I've configured my Lazy.nvim to build lls by those two commands above.

[olekspickle]

3rd time I'm trying to install lua ls on linux machine.
3rd time I fail to compile it's everchanging magic build system and give up.
It's so frustrating i can't just sudo apt install lua-language-server on the most popular distro for noobs.

I also tried to copying binary file from the artifact tar from release, but it has given me the same boostrap error.

[tomlau10]

I also tried to copying binary file from the artifact tar from release, but it has given me the same boostrap error.

I'm not sure how you did it 😕 , but here is how my team install LuaLS in a github action:

name: lint
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  pull_request_target:
jobs:
  lint:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env:
      LUALS_VERSION: 3.13.6
      LUALS_PATH: /tmp/luals
    steps:
      - name: Check out repository code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha || '' }}
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: |
          # install LuaLS
          mkdir -p ${LUALS_PATH} && curl -L https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/releases/download/${LUALS_VERSION}/lua-language-server-${LUALS_VERSION}-linux-x64.tar.gz | tar -xz -C ${LUALS_PATH}
          echo "${LUALS_PATH}/bin" >> ${GITHUB_PATH}
      - name: Run LuaLS
        run: |
          lua-language-server --check=. --num_threads=2 --checklevel=Error

• we just curl the lua-language-server-${LUALS_VERSION}-linux-x64.tar.gz then extract to a folder
• add {luals_folder}/bin to the $PATH
• then we can execute lua-language-server from anywhere 🤔

---

tested in windows wsl2 ubuntu

I then tried the same approach on windows wsl2 ubuntu

• curl the release package then extract it
• but instead of adding {luals_folder}/bin to $PATH, I use symlink and add it to ~/.local/bin instead

LUALS_VERSION=3.13.6
LUALS_PATH=~/.local/luals
mkdir -p ${LUALS_PATH} && curl -L https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/releases/download/${LUALS_VERSION}/lua-language-server-${LUALS_VERSION}-linux-x64.tar.gz | tar -xz -C ${LUALS_PATH}
ln -s ${LUALS_PATH}/bin/lua-language-server ~/.local/bin/lua-language-server

• and done

tomlau10@TOMLAU-PC ~
$ which lua-language-server
/home/tomlau10/.local/bin/lua-language-server

tomlau10@TOMLAU-PC ~
$ lua-language-server
Content-Length: 55

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"$/hello","params":["world"]}

---

some important note

IIUC the lua-language-server executable is just the underlying modded lua interpreter, while the logic are within all those lua scripts.
I don't think you can just copy the binary to make it work 🤔