Not sure how to load .lua files and their globals into the Lua struct

[TheLeonsver1]

I want to add user-modding to my game which is made with rust.
for that, I want to load player-made .lua files at runtime,
but I don't understand how it's done with mlua.

in the examples I see you loading a chunk, which if I understand correctly, is not a full source file but rather the insides of one lua function, and that's great, but I want to load a full source .lua file with its globals and functions from a string. and then call the global functions from that file but there are no examples of how to do that as far as I can tell.

my basic use-case for example would be to load a stringified .lua file into the Lua struct.
and then for example get the main function from the globals of the Lua struct and call that like you load print and call that in the guided_tour example.
would love to get your help, thank you!

[khvzak]

Loading stringified .lua file into Lua globals should work fine, eg:

fn main() {
    let lua = mlua::Lua::new();
    let source = std::fs::read_to_string("file.lua").unwrap();
    lua.load(&source).exec().unwrap();
    let globals = lua.globals();
    let main = globals.get::<_, mlua::Function>("main").unwrap();
    main.call::<_, ()>(()).unwrap();
}

file.lua:

function main()
    print("hello")
end

[khvzak]

Alternatively instead of globals you can also set a specific environment for loaded file.

[TheLeonsver1]

Thank you very much for the help! I think you should maybe add this example to the guided tour example. it will help new users a lot I believe since I didn't think lua.load(&source).exec().unwrap(); would work that way. Thank you very much again!

[zackfall]

I know this is an old discussion, but this is something that I can do with the luarocks plugins that I download? I mean, I want to do a neovim plugin, but I need to use plugins from luarocks. Can I do something like this:

fn main() {
    let lua = mlua::Lua::new();
    lua.load("conf = require(\"telescope.config\").values").exec()?;
    let globals = lua.globals();
    let conf = globals.get::<_, mlua::Table>("conf").unwrap();
}

and then use the values in it? or should I do something different in that case?

[khvzak]

@zackfall you example should work fine, conf is a global variable and will be available everywhere (with default env).