LGI is gobject-introspection based dynamic Lua binding to GObject based libraries. It allows using GObject-based libraries directly from Lua.

Licensed under MIT-style license, see LICENSE file for full text.

Home of the project is on GitHub.

LGI is tested and compatible with standard Lua 5.1 and Lua 5.2 and recent LuaJIT 2 betas. Compatibility with other Lua implementations is not tested yet.

If you need to support pre-gobject-introspection GTK (ancient GTK+ 2.x releases), use Lua-Gnome.

In order to be able to compile native part of lgi, gobject-introspection >= 0.10.8 development package must be installed, although preferred version is >= 1.30. The development package is called libgirepository1.0-dev on debian-based systems (like Ubuntu) and gobject-introspection-devel on RedHat-based systems (like Fedora).

Using LuaRocks:

luarocks install lgi

Alternatively, use make-based installation:

make
[sudo] make install [PREFIX=<prefix>] [DESTDIR=<destdir>]

Please note that on BSD-systems you may need to use 'gmake'.

See examples in samples/ directory. Documentation is available in doc/ directory in markdown format. Process it with your favorite markdown processor if you want to read it in HTML.

• Avoid unexpected dependency on cairo-devel, cairo-runtime is now enough
• Make set_resident() more robust and fix stack leak for lua5.2 case, avoid useless warning when set_resident() fails (to accomodate for static linking case).
• Fix small memory leak (mutex) which occured once per opened lua_State using lgi.

• objects and structs: actually implement '_type' property as documented
• tests: Fix regression tests for less common platforms
• Pango: Add a few missing overrides
• cairo: Fix Context:user_to_device() family of methods.
• GStreamer: Add support for transfer!=none for input objects. This is needed to avoid leaks caused by strange usage of transfer annotations of gstreamer-0.10
• GStreamer: Add more missing overrides
• GStreamer: Fix and improve samples
• Various fixes for usecase when lua context with loaded lgi is closed and opened again
• Gtk: Add missing Gtk.Builder:connect_signals() override

• Add cairo bindings, cairo sample and finish some gtk-demo parts which were requiring cairo

• Fix a few problems on more exotic architectures (s390x, mips, ia64).
• Allow passing byte.buffer when UTF8 string is requested.

• Port gtk3-demo to Lua code. Try running 'lua samples/gtk-demo/main.lua'
• Finish override set for Gtk
• Extend and document features for interfacing LGI with external libraries (exporting and importing objects and structures via lightuserdata pointers).
• Fix: a few bugs with resolving bitflags values
• Fix: a few bugs in coroutines-as-callbacks feature
• Fix: workaround for crashing bug in gobject-introspection 1.32.0
• Fix: don't try to squeeze GType into lua_Number any more; this could cause crashes on some 64bit arches.

• Changed handling of enums and bitflags, switched from marshaling them as numbers to prefering strings for enums and tables (sets or lists) for bitflags. Numeric values still work for Lua->C marshalling, but backward compatibility is broken in C->Lua enum and bitflags marshalling.
• Compatible with Lua 5.2 and LuaJIT
• Added standardized way for overrides to handle constructor argument table array part.
• Existing Gtk overrides reworked and improved, there is now a way to describe and create widget hierarchies in Lua-friendly way. See docs/gtk.lua, chapter about Gtk.Container for overview and samples.
• Various bugfixes and portability fixes.

• Project hosting moved to GitHub.
• Build system switched from waf to simple Makefile-based one
• Added automatic locking of thread-sensitive libraries (Gdk and Clutter). There is no need to add Gdk.threads_enter(), Gdk.threads_leave() and Clutter.threads_enter(), Clutter.threads_leave() pairs into application, lgi handles this automatically.
• Added new sample samples/console.lua, which implements already quite usable Lua console using Gtk widgets.
• Fixes for compatibility with older gobject-introspection 0.10.8 package
• Testsuite is not built automatically, because building it can be apparently problematic on some systems, causing installation failure even when testsuite is not needed at all.
• Remove setlocale() initialization, which could break Lua when used with some regional locales. The downside of this change is that marshaling file names containing non-ASCII characters on systems which define G_BROKEN_FILENAMES environment variable (probably only Fedora 15) does not work now.

First public release