Add LUA to the buildpack

[cloudfoundry]

Add LUA to the buildpack

[jchesterpivotal]

As a totally irrelevant nitpick, it's "Lua", not "LUA". It's not an acronym, it's the Portuguese word for "Moon".

[techtenk]

I'm also interested in enabling Lua, but perhaps Perl will work for my purposes. Is ngx_http_perl_module enabled by default in this buildpack? How would I tell, and how would I enable it if not?

[cf-gitbot]

We have created an issue in Pivotal Tracker to manage this:

https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/134064643

The labels on this github issue will be updated when the story is started.

[RochesterinNYC]

Currently, the only way to handle this use case would be to:

• fork the buildpack and change the bin/compile script to install LUA or Perl (via curl and installation) or something similar. Note that the vcap user running bin/compile does not have sudo privileges so apt-get install lua will not work.
• fork the buildpack and vendor in a packaged LUA binary for use in the cached version of the buildpack. Example of how we vendor in nginx, how we get that vendored file during staging, and how we untar and setup nginx. This blog post about custom buildpacks might be helpful as well: http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/creating-a-custom-buildpack/
• Add LUA or Perl to a custom rootfs that you can generate using stacks: https://github.com/cloudfoundry/stacks

The Buildpacks team is undergoing a track of work to add multi buildpack support, which would cover this use case. You could stage the staticfile buildpack after staging a perl buildpack or lua buildpack and both perl/LUA and nginx would be available on the end app droplet. During the staticfile buildpack staging, perl or LUA would be available as well.

[JelteMX]

Thanks @RochesterinNYC for the suggestions, I am going to look into those 👍

[sesmith177]

@JelteMX have you been able to follow @RochesterinNYC 's suggestions?

[JelteMX]

Nope, not yet. I need more time to dig into it. I have zero experience with creating buildpacks, but I am a quick learner. Already made some adjustment to a project I am working on (Mendix docs) where we do redirects, but I need to get the url rewriting fixed soon.

[athornton2012]

@JelteMX any issues with forking the buildpack?

[JelteMX]

Well due to time-pressure I didn't get around to do it. We found a (not ideal) workaround, but I am still going to do it (probably end of this week/next week)

[athornton2012]

@JelteMX On second thought, Perl is already included in the rootfs. Is there any reason you wouldn't want to use Perl?

[JelteMX]

Wait, what? Can I use Perl here? That changes things. I'll have a look at it later on. If I can use this, I don't need to use Lua (although, as for what I have read, Lua is slightly faster. Faster is better on a high-traffic website)

[sclevine]

Closing this for now as we have no plans to add Lua to the buildpack. Feel free to open new issues for future reports, suggestions, or questions.