Single File Apps

LDE gives you the ability to compile your lua program into single files.

Bundle your program into a single lua file

Run this to bundle your project and all of its dependencies into a single .lua file

lde bundle

You can pass it options like --bytecode to bundle them into a bytecode file for faster startup.

Bundle your program into a native executable

This option is very interesting if you want to give users access to an executable without needing lua on their system.

On Linux and macOS you will need gcc available on your machine. On Windows, lde downloads and sets up MinGW automatically.

lde compile

This will bundle into a single lua file and then compile an executable with the lde runtime built-in to execute it.

The lde executable itself is in fact just created with lde compile!