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Getting Started

By Bruce Hill | November 5, 2020

Nomsu also works with LuaJIT version 2.0+, if it is compiled with Lua 5.2 compatibility (when building LuaJIT: make XCFLAGS=-DLUAJIT_ENABLE_LUA52COMPAT). This guide only covers using Lua.

This page will walk you through getting set up with Nomsu. Nomsu's only prerequisites are Lua and LPEG. Nomsu has been tested on Mac, Linux, and Windows 10.

Installing Nomsu on Windows

For Windows, the best way to install is to download the self-contained executable build:

nomsu-windows.zip

To get started, launch nomsu[version number].exe and type tutorial into the interactive console and hit "enter" twice.

You can right click a ".nom" file and choose "Open With..." and browse to the Nomsu .exe file and choose to always open .nom files with it. From then on, you can launch a Nomsu file by double clicking it. If you want a program to remain open until you close it, put this line at the end of your program: ask "press enter to exit..."

Installing Prerequisites on Mac

If you use the Homebrew package manager, you can install Lua and LuaRocks (a Lua package manager) with: brew update brew install lua brew install luarocks Then, you can install the Lua modules LPEG (required) and LuaFilesystem (recommended) with: luarocks install lpeg luarocks install luafilesystem Or, if any of these steps don't work for you, you can also build the prerequisites from source code.

Next: Download Nomsu

Installing Prerequisites on Linux

Use your package manager to install Lua and LuaRocks (a Lua package manager), for example, using apt-get: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install lua5.3 luarocks With LuaRocks, install LPEG and LuaFilesystem: sudo luarocks --lua-version=5.3 install lpeg luafilesystem Or, if any of these steps don't work for you, you can also build the prerequisites from source code.

Next: Download Nomsu

Building Prerequisites from Source

Building Lua from Source

Paraphrasing the instructions from Lua's website: cd ~ curl -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.5.tar.gz tar xzf lua-5.3.5.tar.gz cd lua-5.3.5

For Mac: make macosx test

For Linux: make linux test

sudo make install

Building LPEG from Source

LPEG is a Lua library used by Nomsu for Parsing Expression Grammars. To build and install it from source: cd ~ curl -O http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg-1.0.1.tar.gz tar xzf lpeg-1.0.1.tar.gz cd lpeg-1.0.1

For Mac: make LUADIR=/usr/local/include macosx

For Linux: make LUADIR=/usr/local/include linux

  sudo cp re.lua /usr/local/share/lua/5.3/
  sudo cp lpeg.so /usr/local/lib/lua/5.3/

Building LuaFilesystem from Source

LuaFilesystem is an optional (but recommended) Lua module that handles cross-platform filesystem functionality. Nomsu can run without it, but will be a little slower. To build LuaFilesystem: cd ~ curl https://codeload.github.com/keplerproject/luafilesystem/tar.gz/v1_7_0_2 > luafilesystem-1.7.0.2.tar.gz tar xzf luafilesystem-1.7.0.2.tar.gz cd luafilesystem-1.7.0.2

For Mac:

Edit the # OS dependent section of the config file to comment out the Linux LIB_OPTION line and uncomment the Mac version. Then, in the file Makefile, delete the text:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET="10.3"; export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET;

so the line just reads:

$(CC) $(LIB_OPTION) -o src/lfs.so $(OBJS)

make
sudo make install

Now, you should have all the necessary prerequisites installed.

Next: Download Nomsu

Downloading Nomsu

Once you have the prerequisites, download and unzip Nomsu:

curl -O https://nomsu.org/releases/nomsu.zip
unzip nomsu.zip
cd nomsu-*

That's it! You can now run the Nomsu tutorial from within the directory you just created:

lua nomsu.lua -t tutorial

If you want to install Nomsu so it's available on the whole system as the command nomsu, you can run this from within the Nomsu directory:

make test && sudo make install