RockZ

A Z shell virtualenvwrapper-lookalike, loosely based on Adam Brenecki's virtualfish for the Fish shell, and highly based upon my own VirtualZ.

• For Lua instead of Python.
• Using LuaRocks instead of Pip.

☺

Quickstart

RockZ needs the paths to the Lua header files and the Lua library in order to bootstrap LuaRocks — so in turn LuaRocks knows how to build binary modules. The names and locations vary in each system, so instead RockZ expects the user to define a profile which stores the needed paths.

The following should work for creating a default profile in most GNU/Linux distributions:

rockz profile default \
  --lua=/usr/bin/lua \
  --include=/usr/include \
  --library=/usr/lib/liblua.so

Once you have a profile, you can create a new “rockenv” (Lua+LuaRocks environment):

rockz new myenv

The variables ${ROCK_ENV} and ${ROCK_ENV_NAME} will be set with the full path to the rockenv prefix directory and the rockenv name, respectively.

Environments can be managed with the rest of rockz subcommands:

rockz activate myenv
rockz new myotherenv
rockz rm myenv
rockz deactivate

Installation & Setup

The recommended way is to use a plugin manager. By default, the location where RockZ looks for rockenvs is ~/.rockenvs. This can be changed by setting the desired path in the ${ROCKZ_HOME} variable.

With zgen, add the following to your .zshrc:

zgen load aperezdc/rockz

Using with LuaJIT

RockZ works just fine with LuaJIT. You will need to create a profile pointing to the LuaJIT binary and libraries. Use the profile subcommand as follows:

rockz profile luajit \
  --lua=/usr/bin/luajit \
  --include=/usr/include/luajit-2.0 \
  --library=/usr/lib/libluajit-5.1.so.2

(Note that the actual paths may be different in your system — please change the paths in the above invocation accordingly.)

Now that the profile is available, use --profile with the new subcommand to create a LuaJIT-powered environment:

rockz new luajitenv --profile=luajit

Now because RockZ created a symbolic link names lua to the Lua interpreter specified in the profile, using lua will actually run LuaJIT:

% readlink "$(which lua)"
/usr/bin/luajit-2.0.4
% lua
LuaJIT 2.0.4 -- Copyright (C) 2005-2015 Mike Pall. http://luajit.org/
JIT: ON CMOV SSE2 SSE3 fold cse dce fwd dse narrow loop abc sink fuse
>

Isn't that convenient?

Rockenv name in the prompt

When a rockenv is active, the following variables are defined:

• ROCK_ENV contains the full path to the active environment.
• ROCK_ENV_NAME contains the name of the active environment.

For example, the following will prepend the name of the current rockenv to your existing prompt, but only if there is an environment active:

PROMPT="\${ROCK_ENV_NAME:+\${ROCK_ENV_NAME} }${PROMPT}"