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Lua 5.3 Reference Manual

Copyright © 2015 Lua.org, PUC-Rio. Freely available under the terms of the Lua license.

Modules

The package library provides basic facilities for loading modules in Lua. It exports one function directly in the global environment: require. Everything else is exported in a table package.

require (modname)

Loads the given module. The function starts by looking into the package.loaded table to determine whether modname is already loaded. If it is, then require returns the value stored at package.loaded[modname]. Otherwise, it tries to find a loader for the module.

To find a loader, require is guided by the package.searchers sequence. By changing this sequence, we can change how require looks for a module. The following explanation is based on the default configuration for package.searchers.

First require queries package.preload[modname]. If it has a value, this value (which must be a function) is the loader. Otherwise require searches for a Lua loader using the path stored in package.path. If that also fails, it tries an all-in-one loader (see package.searchers).

Once a loader is found, require calls the loader with two arguments: modname and an extra value dependent on how it got the loader. (If the loader came from a file, this extra value is the file name.) If the loader returns any non-nil value, require assigns the returned value to package.loaded[modname]. If the loader does not return a non-nil value and has not assigned any value to package.loaded[modname], then require assigns true to this entry. In any case, require returns the final value of package.loaded[modname].

If there is any error loading or running the module, or if it cannot find any loader for the module, then require raises an error.

package.loaded

A table used by require to control which modules are already loaded. When you require a module modname and package.loaded[modname] is not false, require simply returns the value stored there.

This variable is only a reference to the real table; assignments to this variable do not change the table used by require.

package.path

The path used by require to search for a Lua loader.

At start-up, Lua initializes this variable with the value of the environment variable LUA_PATH_5_3 or the environment variable LUA_PATH, if those environment variables are not defined. Any ";;" in the value of the environment variable is replaced by the default path.

package.preload

A table to store loaders for specific modules (see require).

This variable is only a reference to the real table; assignments to this variable do not change the table used by require.

package.searchers

A table used by require to control how to load modules.

Each entry in this table is a searcher function. When looking for a module, require calls each of these searchers in ascending order, with the module name (the argument given to require) as its sole parameter. The function can return another function (the module loader) plus an extra value that will be passed to that loader, or a string explaining why it did not find that module (or nil if it has nothing to say).

Lua initializes this table with four searcher functions.

The first searcher simply looks for a loader in the package.preload table.

The second searcher looks for a loader as a Lua library, using the path stored at package.path. The search is done as described in function package.searchpath.

All searchers except the first one (preload) return as the extra value the file name where the module was found, as returned by package.searchpath. The first searcher returns no extra value.

package.searchpath (name, path [, sep [, rep]])

Searches for the given name in the given path.

A path is a string containing a sequence of templates separated by semicolons. For each template, the function replaces each interrogation mark (if any) in the template with a copy of name wherein all occurrences of sep (a dot, by default) were replaced by rep (the system's directory separator, by default), and then tries to open the resulting file name.

For instance, if the path is the string

     "./?.lua;./?.lc;/usr/local/?/init.lua"
		

the search for the name foo.a will try to open the files ./foo/a.lua, ./foo/a.lc, and /usr/local/foo/a/init.lua, in that order.

Returns the resulting name of the first file that it can open in read mode (after closing the file), or nil plus an error message if none succeeds. (This error message lists all file names it tried to open.)

Last update: Fri Nov 27 18:43:18 BRST 2015