Development Setup#

Introduction#

You can use any text editor to write mods, but it is recommended to pick an editor that supports the Language Server Protocol (LSP). The LSP provides auto completions and diagnostics to aid you in development.

Examples of Editors that support the LSP are:

Installing the Language Server#

How you install the language server depends on the editor and operating system you use.

For VS Code, install the Lua Plugin which bundles the Language Server.

If you use NeoVim, you may install the Language Server via mason or another LSP plugin.

If your editor does not bundle the language server, you need to install it on the operating system level.

Setting up autocompletion#

Downloading the type documentation#

The type documentation allows autocompletion including type hints to be shown in your editor.

We will use Luanti API as a source of type documentation. Please note that this is not an official project and that it is experimental! For more context, you can take a look at this issue.

If you would not like to proceed with with downloading that repository, you can adapt the below instructions for the path <Luanti installation>/builtin to get untyped completions.

There are two ways to setup autocompletion.

Option 1: Globally#

Download the repository “luanti-api” and put it somewhere on your PC. Find guidance on how to download the repository as a zip archive or clone it via git.

Let’s suppose luanti-api is now at /home/user/luanti-api.

Lastly, you need to configure the Lua language server. For VS Code, it’s done via settings.json. Look up the respective guide for your editor on how to configure the language server.

To make the language server pick up the type documentation, set workspace.library to the path you downloaded the type documentation to. In our example, it is /home/user/luanti-api.

For VS Code, you would put add this to settings.json (User):

{
  "Lua.workspace.library": ["/home/user/luanti-api"]
}

Option 2: Per project#

You can configure the autocompletion per project. First, you need to add the type documentation as a git submodule. You could also download the repository files and put them into the project root if you don’t want to use git submodules, but that is bad practice.

Initialize a git repository

git init

Setup submodules

git submodule init

Add the submodule

git submodule add https://git.minetest.land/archie/luanti-api.git

The final step is to configure the language server. To do this per project, we will add a .luarc.json file to the project root:

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LuaLS/vscode-lua/master/setting/schema.json",
  "workspace.library": ["./luanti-api"]
}