Resources

Asynchronous I/O

• Luver - a luvit without lit.
• LuaNode - Asynchronous I/O for Lua, using the Reactor pattern like Node.js, EventMachine or Twisted.
• Lua Corovel - Asynchronous, event-loop development environment for Lua

Batteries Included

• UFO - Un Finished Object - a portable distribution of LuaJIT with precompiled binaries, libraries and FFI bindings

Build Tools and Standalone Makers

• luastatic - Build a standalone executable from a Lua program.
• Lake - A build engine written in Lua, similar to Ruby's rake.
• Luapak - a command-line tool, multi-platform, adjustable, all-in-one (yet modular) solution for building a standalone, zero-dependencies, possibly statically linked (only on Linux) executable for (almost) any Lua program.

Compiles to JS, asm.js or WebAssembly for Browser

• Luwa - Lua WASM JIT, a Lua runtime on top of WASM

Cryptographic

• PLC - A small collection of crpytographic functions, and related utilities, implemented in pure Lua (version 5.3 or above)

Database drivers

• Tarantool - is an in-memory database and application server.
• Redis - A Lua client library for the Redis key value storage system.
• lredis - a Redis (in-memory data structure store) client library for Lua

Data structures

• array.lua - A small library with useful methods to handle Lua's table when it's working like an Array

Debugging

• MobDebug - Remote debugger for Lua.
• inspect.lua - Human-readable representation of Lua tables
• lovebird - a Browser-based debug console. Originally made for LÖVE, but works in any project with LuaSocket support.
• ProFi - Simple profiler that works with LuaJIT and produces a report file.
• luatrace - Toolset for tracing/analyzing/profiling script execution and generating detailed reports.
• StackTracePlus - Drop-in upgrade to Lua's stack traces which adds local context and improves readability.
• clidebugger - A simple command line interface debugger for Lua 5.1 written in pure Lua.

Game Framework

• NoobHub - Network multiplayer and messaging for CoronaSDK, Moai, Gideros, LÖVE & Defold

Guides / Tutorials

• Lua Missions - A series of 'Missions' to work through which are designed to teach aspects of Lua along the way.

Libraries

• LuaCS - code.com/blog/2018/5/23.html) - a CSS Selectors parser library for Lua
• XMLua - code.com/blog/2017/12/25.html) - An user-friendly XML/HTML processing library for Lua based on libxml2
• luaexpat - a SAX XML parser based on the Expat (a stream-oriented XML parser) library.
• neturl - A Robust URL Parser (with the ability to parse querystrings) and Builder for Lua.
• lpeg_patterns - A collection of LPEG patterns
• luatz - Time, Date and Timezone library for lua

Lua 5.1

• Shine - a general purpose, dynamic, multi-paradigm programming language which is based on a modified version of the LuaJIT VM with features geared more to programming in the large.
• Metalua - a compiler for a superset of the Lua 5.1 language, which supports compile-time metaprogramming.
• Typed Lua - An Optional Type System for Lua

Lua 5.3

• Pallene - rio.br/~roberto/docs/pallene-sblp.pdf) [Slides] - a statically typed, ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled sister language to Lua, with a focus on performance. Pallene is also designed to seamlessly interoperate with Lua.

Lua VM in Lua

• LuaJIT Language Toolkit - an implementation of the Lua programming language written in Lua itself, as a starting point to implement a programming language that targets the LuaJIT virtual machine.

Message broker / queues

• lzmq - Lua binding to ZeroMQ version 3.2 or 4.x library. This library has C and FFI version of binding.

Miscellaneous

• Microlight - A little library of useful Lua functions, intended as the 'light' version of Penlight
• lua-ext - Standard library / extensions for Lua. math, operator functions, execution platform, Set implementation for Lua, I/O on strings; instead of files.
• Kong - a cloud-native, fast, scalable, and distributed Microservice Abstraction Layer (also known as an API Gateway, API Middleware or in some cases Service Mesh).
• Snabb Switch - a simple and fast packet networking toolkit.
• MoonGen - a fully scriptable high-speed packet generator built on DPDK and LuaJIT.

Multitasking

• lua-llthreads2 - drop-in replacement for lua-llthreads library with several additional functionality.
• Coil - A tiny cooperative threading module for Lua.

Native OS APIs

• win32_api_luajit - Cosmin's win32 api for luajit (with adjustments)
• ljsyscall - Unix system calls for LuaJIT

Network

• lua-httpclient - a unified wrapper around a openresty/ngx.location.capture or luasocket and luasec as drivers.
• lua-websockets - This project provides Lua modules for Websocket Version 13 conformant clients and servers.
• Turbo - a asynchronous networking suite and framework built for LuaJIT 2 to building fast and scalable network applications. It uses a event-driven, non-blocking, threadless design.

Programming Paradigms

• 30log - a small class system for OOP in Lua
• middleclass - A simple OOP library for Lua. It has inheritance, metamethods (operators), class variables and weak mixin support.
• PLoop - a C# like style object-oriented program system for lua.
• Luvent - Simple Event Library for Lua
• toynet - A simple event-driven I/O for Lua, coroutine based.
• lua-reactor-light - Lightweight lua reactor. Depends only on luasocket and exposes NodeJS-style API
• Lua Fun - a high-performance functional programming library for Lua
• Moses - Utility library for functional programming in Lua
• lamda - A functional programming library for Lua, inspired by Ramda.
• Safer - Paranoid Lua programming

Testing

• LuaUnit - a popular unit-testing framework for Lua, with an interface typical of xUnit libraries.
• Luacheck - A tool for linting and static analysis of Lua code.
• LuaInspect - a tool that does Lua code analysis, with plugins for HTML and SciTE.
• lualint - lua linter and static analysis of global variable

Utilities

• Allen - An utility library to manipulate strings, which provides a set of helpers for strings operations for Lua.
• Strictness - a small module to track access and assignment to undefined variables in Lua
• Serpent - Lua serializer and pretty printer.

Web Frameworks

• Orbit - an MVC web framework for Lua, based on WSAPI. [1]

Web Plataforms

• VeryNginx - a very powerful and friendly nginx which provide WAF, Control Panel, and Dashboards.
• OpenStar - Lua WAF, Nginx+Lua, OpenResty, LuaJIT, WAF+, CDN
• nginx-lua-prometheus - Prometheus metric library for Nginx written in Lua