How to install Lua 5 in Mac OS X Leopard

Open up terminal. Copy the link of the latest Lua version and download it:

cd /tmp
wget http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.1.4.tar.gz

Extract and compile:

tar -xzvf lua-5.1.4.tar.gz
cd lua-5.1.4
make macosx

Test and install (if test goes through)

make test
sudo make install

And you’re done!

24 Comments

Name said

shit ain’t workin’

NormB said

wget isn’t installed on leopard by default.

Found this little tidbit:

echo ‘alias wget=”curl -O”‘ >> ~/.bash_profile

Worked for me

Tofu said

Thank you worked perfectly! (I had wget already from darwinports)

luk said

Thank you very much! It worked great!

Natsuki said

Thanks very much .it works well ,
the problem is that textmate doesn’t hava a lua highlight support built-in ,
anyhow I’ll fix it

Walker said

Worked wonderfully. Thank you!

Julien said

Thanks for this! To the point. Works perfectly

Andru said

hi
I’m new to Mac.I have installed this. But I dont know how to open it. Can you please help me

iksnae said

Thank you so much!

iksnae said

thank you!

Jeronimo said

I’ve found a lot of complicated ways to do install Lua on Mac and the simplest and most obvious worked at the first attempt. Good post !

LUA-kather said

Worked perfectly! thanks a bunch…
For newbies:
- To download the Lua distribution without using wget, do this:
   1) click the link to the lua distribution in Safar; this will download the tarfile to your Downloads folder
   2) Open the Downloads folder in the Finder and look for the lua-5.1.4.tar file
   3) In your terminal window, type the following:
   cd /tmp
   Now press the Enter key.
   4) In your terminal window, do the following:
   type cp but do not press enter
   drag the lua-5.1.4.tar file from the Downloads folder to the Terminal window; this will automatically enter the full pathname to that file into your command line. Don’t press Enter yet.
   Type a space and then a period into the same command line.
   Your command should look like this:
   cp .

5) NOW press Enter. Terminal copies the Lua tarfile to your /tmp folder.

6) continue from the “Extract and compile” step above.

- if you get the message that make isnt found, install Xcode Mac OS developer tools from your OS X install disk

LUA-kather said

Couple more tips: this procedure works on Tiger too, but the Lua distribution gets downloaded to your desktop instead of to a /Downloads folder

Make sure you get a .tar.gz file or you’ll have to change the tar options to unpack the file successfully