Bundling to a Lua File

lde bundle takes your project and all of its installed dependencies and merges them into a single self-contained .lua file. The result can be run with any LuaJIT runtime without needing lde installed.

How it works

lde builds your project, installs dependencies into ./target/, then walks every .lua file in that directory. Each file is registered as a package.preload entry under its module name, so require() resolves them from the bundle rather than the filesystem. The final line calls your package’s entrypoint.

Basic usage

lde bundle

This outputs <name>.lua in your project root.

Custom output path

lde bundle --outfile dist/myapp.lua

Bytecode bundle

Pass --bytecode to compile each module to LuaJIT bytecode before embedding. The output is smaller and faster to load, but is only compatible with the LuaJIT version bundled in LDE — it will not run on Lua 5.x or a different LuaJIT build.

lde bundle --bytecode

The bytecode bundle is itself compiled as a single chunk, so the output is a binary .lua file.