Installing Lua LGI on macOS

I wanted to see how easy it would be to build some very simple GUI apps in Lua. As I already have GTK+3 installed on my machine, I thought it would be a good idea to try to use it from Lua. LGI is gobject-introspection based dynamic Lua binding to GObject based libraries including GTK+3. It can be installed via Luarocks.

A simple attempt at installing LGI results in an error as Luarocks can't find the libffi library that LGI requires. It is a similar problem to the one I encountered with installing the Ruby GTK+3 Gem.  Applying a similar solution to the one kindly supplied by the Ruby Gnome 2 team did the trick.

This is the command that worked:


  sudo PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/opt/libffi/lib/pkgconfig luarocks-jit install lgi

Notes:

I installed GTK+3 using Homebrew

I am using LuaJIT 2.0.4

I am using luarocks-jit 2.3.0