Possible to run luarocks from within embedded Lua VM?

[maarek]

I'm exploring ideas for adding plugins to my rust application and one thought I had was to use mlua to embed the Lua VM and run provided lua scripts. What I am unsure of is whether I could pull in luarocks into the embedded vm and run them? I saw some documentation about building rocks from rust modules but not using rocks within the embedded lua.

[alerque]

Sure, you can do that just fine. I've set up sile (develop branch) to run an entire Lua application including loading external LuaRocks (Lua or C modules). It also has the option to build with those external modules embeded in the Rust binary (again for both pure Lua and C modules) so it can be self contained. The latter involves a bit of calisthenics writing your own loaders, but the former is dead simple: just set the package.path/package.cpath to the correct values for where your LuaRocks are installed and away you go.