Lua is a very useful language for many things.  Extending core base code with modules and add-ons have made it very useful in game development but since Lua is table-based it can also be easily applied to web development. Well that time has come, See the Kepler Project for a nice collection of modules that make a good start for web development with Lua.

Kepler is an open source platform that brings the power of Lua to web development. There are a number of great Web development platforms out there but none balances portability, size, power and extensibility quite like Kepler does:

• Being extremely portable and light means that it can be installed in very constrained devices as much as in providers that limit the amount of RAM and processing time for your scripts.
• If you ever heard of the customization features of games such as World of Warcraft, think about all that power applied to web scripting.
• Being extensible means both that we can extend the platform by adding new modules and that the users of the applications that you build can extend those applications using Lua.

Kepler was created by Fábrica Digital and PUC-Rio and is continuously being improved by a core team of commiters (see Dev Team) and lots of contributors (see Credits).

Kepler is free software and uses the MIT license model: it can be used for both academic and commercial purposes at absolutely no cost. See the Kepler License for more details.

Kepler is a platform that uses LuaRocks to offer Modules such as:

• Page based and MVC XHTML generation (WSAPI, CGILua and Orbit)
• SQL and XML processing (LuaSQL and LuaExpat)
• Hash (MD5) and a pair crypt/decrypt
• Zip files reading (LuaZip)

The Lua community is constantly contributing with more modules that can be used with the Kepler Architecture. Most of those modules are catalogued on LuaForge and new ones keep coming.

Unix installation

Please check UNIX Installation for a detailed view of how to install Kepler on Unix machines (including OSX).

Windows installation

Installing Kepler on Windows does not require any C compiler and should work on any Windows machine with internet access.

1. Download LuaRocks and install it using install /SCRIPTS c:\luarocks\0.5.2
2. Add the LuaRocks scripts dir to your system path (the same directory used in the /SCRIPTS parameter above)
3. Install Kepler and Xavante using luarocks install kepler-xavante
4. Configure everything using setup-kepler and following the instructions
5. Use xavante to run Xavante as a tray bar application, or use ‘xavante_start’ to run Xavante from the command prompt. Another option is to run Kepler using CGI

Once Kepler is running, you might want to look at those pages:

• Hello World will tell you how to write a simple application
• Using a Database will tell you how to use some of the popular databases with Kepler.
• Configuring Web Servers will tell you how to use Kepler with some specific web servers.

The Kepler 1.1 Unix installer can be downloaded from its downloads page. Check the Installation page for more details and for the Windows installation instructions (using LuaRocks).

If you need the binaries for specifics Modules you can also get them from LuaForge, on the module respective project page.