Portable Lua kernel for Jupyter
Last updated Jun 5, 2026
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Lua 59.9%
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README
ILua
ILua is a feature-packed, portable console and Jupyter kernel for the Lua language.
Features
* Lua-implementation agnostic * Should work with any lua interpreter out of the box * Works with Lua5.1-5.3, LuaJIT and even some exotic implementations like GopherLua * Easy to port to embedded interpreters * Code completions * Code inspection * Retrieve function documentation * Can even retrieve the function source if available (invoked with ??) * Pretty-printed results * Access last result with _ * Cross-session execution history * Works on Linux and Windows * No native dependencies for Lua * Python's pip based installationInstallation
pip install ilua
From source
git clone https://github.com/guysv/ilua.git --recurse-submodules
cd ilua
pip install -e . --user
python setup.py installdata -d ~/.local # pip install -e . forgets datafiles...A Bit on ILua's Architecture
As opposed to existing Lua Jupyter kernels which implement the Jupyter protocol in Lua (and depend on lzmq which is a native module), ILua implements the communication with Jupyter in Python, which in turn talks with Lua via named-pipe IPC. This frees ILua from being bounded to a single Lua implementation ABI. The Lua interpreter only needs to respect the$LUA_PATH environment variable and execute a file given as the first argument.
