1. installation

alv is written in the Lua programming language, and is compatible with both Lua 5.3 and luajit.

unix/linux and mac os

Your distribution should provide you with packages for Lua and Luarocks. On Mac OS X, both are provided through homebrew. After installing both of these, you should be able to start the Lua interpreter from the shell:

$ lua
Lua 5.3.5  Copyright (C) 1994-2018 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> 

You can exit using CTRL+C. If the version you see is not 5.3, double check your distribution packages or see if it was installed as lua5.3 or lua53. Similarily, you should be able to run luarocks, luarocks53 or luarocks5.3:

$ luarocks list

Rocks installed for Lua 5.3
---------------------------

Again, double check your installation or try adding --lua-version 5.3 if the displayed version is not 5.3.

With everything ready to go, you can now install alv:

$ luarocks install alive

To use the copilot GUI, you will also need the fltk4lua package, which requires installing or building FLTK (also available through homebrew).

$ luarocks install fltk4lua

With the alive package, two binaries should have been installed on your system: alv and alv-fltk. If you do not find these in your $PATH, you may need to apply the exports from luarocks path upon login, e.g. in your .bashrc.

windows

For Windows, a binary package is available from the latest github release. It includes not only the alv source code, but also a compiled version of Lua 5.3 as well as Luarocks and all of alv’s dependencies.

To use the binary package, simply extract the archive and move the folder wherever you want. You can now start the hello.alv example script by dragging it onto the alv.bat or alv-fltk.bat file in the folder.

If you are going to use the command-line alv.bat, it is recommended to add the directory containing it to %PATH%, so that you can use the alv command anywhere on your system.