Environment Setup

This guide will provide a brief overview on how to setup both the Lune runtime as well as several tools that will help you in development of a DiscordLuau application.

This guide requires no prerequisite knowledge, and aims to get you up to speed, regardless of your background as a developer.

Required

The following tools are typically required for a development environment to build a DiscordLuau application:

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a commonly used code editor that DiscordLuau assumes you’ll be using, there will be several references to VSCode, or branches alike VSCode in this guide.

You can get VSCode here.

To continue, create a new directory for project, and have opened that in VSCode.

Rokit

Rokit is a toolchain manager, enabling developers to easily download and setup project tooling.

This guide assumes that you’re using Rokit, however, you are free to use other installation methods or toolchain managers.

Please follow these steps to install Rokit.

Now, run the following command to set up your current working directory with Rokit:

rokit init

Luau LSP

Luau LSP is a language server protocol implementation for the Luau programming language. It allows for autocomplete, code analysis, and other nice-to-have features in your IDE.

Install the extension from the VSCode Marketplace or OpenVSX Registry:

• VSCode Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JohnnyMorganz.luau-lsp
• OpenVSX Registry: https://open-vsx.org/extension/JohnnyMorganz/luau-lsp

For other IDEs, instructions may be located here.

Lune

Lune is a Luau runtime, enabling us to execute our code. Lune makes it possible to utilize various I/O functionality via its standard library.

To learn more about Lune, its standard library, and installation instructions, please read the documentation

Installing Lune can be done so through Rokit as such:

rokit add lune-org/lune

To verify that Lune has installed correctly, you can execute the following command in your terminal to display your installed Lune version:

lune --version

Git

Git is primarily a version control system, platforms such as GitHub and GitLab allow you to publish your code as repositories.

Install it by following this guide.

Note

Git is not a GUI-based tool. If you’re not comfortable with using the command line, there are plenty of GUI-based clients to simplify the process of using Git!

Optional

The following tools are nice-to-haves, but by all means can be skipped and/or ignored.

Selene

Selene is a Linter for Luau code, and is generally a healthy tool to use to determine poor quality code in your project.

Using Rokit, it can be installed by running:

rokit add Kampfkarren/selene

StyLua

StyLua is an opinionated code formatter for Luau projects, which formats your code to be easily readable.

To install StyLua, follow this guide.

Using Rokit, this would look like:

rokit add JohnnyMorganz/stylua

Conclusion

You now have the tools to start developing a Discord application using DiscordLuau!

The following is a rokit.toml file containing all of the above tools, you can compare what you have to this to ensure everything is correctly installed! Do note that this contains the latest versions of the tools at the time of writing this guide, and these versions may change in the future.

[tools]
lune = "lune-org/lune@0.8.4"
stylua = "JohnnyMorganz/StyLua@0.20.0"
selene = "Kampfkarren/selene@0.27.1"
luau-lsp = "JohnnyMorganz/luau-lsp@1.24.1"

Additionally, you should also have the following applications avaliable in the command line:

git -v

rokit -V

and finally, you’ve installed a code editor/IDE, such as Visual Studio Code!