Lehua

I am not the best writer so I will say Claude was used to write the docs and this readme. I feel it is important to state any AI use. Code however is by me with very little AI assitance.

Lehua is a runtime for Luau. You write Luau, run it right away, and build it into one small program that runs on its own.

It is written in Rust on top of mlua and tokio.

Install

You have three options. You can install it with Rokit, download a prebuilt program from the releases, or build it from source.

Option 1: Install with Rokit

If you use Rokit to manage your tools, install Lehua with one command:

rokit add thekingofspace/LehuaLang lehua

The lehua at the end sets the name of the command. Without it, the command would be called LehuaLang.

Run that inside a project to add Lehua to its rokit.toml, or add --global to make the command available everywhere:

rokit add --global thekingofspace/LehuaLang lehua

Option 2: Download a release

1. Open the Releases page for this project.
2. Download the archive for your system:
   • Windows: lehua-windows-x86_64.zip
   • Linux: lehua-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
3. Extract it. Inside is a folder with the program: lehua.exe on Windows, lehua on Linux.
4. Move the program to a folder on your PATH so you can run it from anywhere.

Option 3: Build from source

First install the tools you need.

• Rust, through rustup. Get it from https://rustup.rs. This gives you cargo, which is the Rust build tool.
• A C and C++ compiler. Lehua builds the Luau core from source, so this is required.
  • Windows: install the Visual Studio Build Tools and pick the "Desktop development with C++" workload.
  • Linux: install gcc and g++. On Debian or Ubuntu that is sudo apt install build-essential.

Then clone the project and build it.

git clone https://github.com/thekingofspace/LehuaLang
cd LehuaLang
cargo build --release

The first build takes a few minutes, because the Luau core is compiled from source. Later builds are much faster.

When it finishes, the program is here:

• Windows: target\release\lehua.exe
• Linux: target/release/lehua

Copy that file to a folder on your PATH. For example, on Linux:

sudo cp target/release/lehua /usr/local/bin/lehua

Check that it works:

lehua --help

Use

Make a new project:

lehua init myapp
cd myapp

Run it:

lehua run

Build a single program you can share. This writes a standalone file into the dist folder that runs on its own, with no Rust and no source files needed:

lehua build

Remove the build output:

lehua clean

Docs

The full guides and library reference live in the docs folder. Open docs/index.html in a browser, or turn on GitHub Pages for the docs folder.

Making a release (for maintainers)

1. Set the version in Cargo.toml, under [package].
2. Open the Actions tab, pick the Release workflow, and run it.

The workflow builds the program for Windows and Linux, then publishes a release with those files attached. The release tag and title both use the version from Cargo.toml, for example v0.1.0.