How to install liblua.a?

[atweiden]

liblua.a is available in the zig-cache/ directory after running ziglua.compileAndCreateModule in my project’s build.zig. Can ziglua possibly install liblua.a into zig-out/? This would help in doing Zig-Go interop — I’d like Go to link against this liblua.a. Perhaps there’s a way of doing this from my project’s build.zig

[natecraddock]

Hi @atweiden!

This is a known issue (see #13). The package manager that will be part of the 0.11.0 release has some of the pieces required for this to work, but we are still waiting on a PR to be merged.

Once the package manager can handle exposing data other than Zig modules, this will become easy. The code would look something like this in a build.zig.

const ziglua = b.dependency("ziglua", .{
    .target = target,
    .optimize = optimize,
});

// here is the library "liblua.a" and can be linked against anything you need, or written to a file
ziglua.artifact("lua");

There may be a way to get this fixed sooner, but I am inclined to wait until the package manager properly supports this use case. Let me know if I misunderstood anything!

[natecraddock]

Hi @atweiden, sorry for the long wait on this.

This is now fixed and I tested to verify this works. The readme has been updated with build instructions that use the new package manager. Here is an example that shows how to link the artifact with your project, and how to write the lua library artifact to the output folder.

// build.zig.zon
.{
    .name = "array",
    .version = "0.0.1",
    .dependencies = .{
        .ziglua = .{
            .url = "https://github.com/natecraddock/ziglua/archive/ab111adb06d2d4dc187ee9e1e352617ca8659155.tar.gz",
            .hash = "12206cf9e90462ee6e14f593ea6e0802b9fe434429ba10992a1451e32900f741005c",
        },
    }
}

// build.zig
const std = @import("std");

pub fn build(b: *std.build.Builder) void {
    const target = b.standardTargetOptions(.{});
    const optimize = b.standardOptimizeOption(.{});

    const ziglua = b.dependency("ziglua", .{
        .target = target,
        .optimize = optimize,
    });

    const lib = b.addSharedLibrary(.{
        .name = "array",
        .root_source_file = .{ .path = "src/array.zig" },
        .target = target,
        .optimize = optimize,
    });

    // These lines link lua to the output library
    lib.addModule("ziglua", ziglua.module("ziglua"));
    lib.linkLibrary(ziglua.artifact("lua"));

    // This line installs liblua to the zig-out/lib/ directory
    b.installArtifact(ziglua.artifact("lua"));

    b.installArtifact(lib);
}

Let me know if you need anything else!