An opinionated code formatter for Lua 5.1, Lua 5.2 and Luau, built using full-moon. StyLua is inspired by the likes of prettier, it parses your Lua codebase, and prints it back out from scratch, enforcing a consistent code style.

Installation

There are multiple ways to install StyLua:

With Github Releases

Pre-built binaries are available on the GitHub Releases Page.

By default, these are built with both Luau and Lua 5.2 features enabled, to cover all possible codebases. If you would like to format a specific Lua version only, see installing from crates.io.

From Crates.io

If you have Rust installed, you can install StyLua using cargo

cargo install stylua

This will compile StyLua (for Lua 5.1) and install it on your local machine. You can pass the --features <flag> argument to build for Lua 5.2 (lua52) or Luau (luau):

cargo install stylua --features lua52
cargo install stylua --features luau

GitHub Actions

You can use the stylua-action GitHub Action in your CI to install and run StyLua. This action will use GitHub releases, rather than running cargo install, to speed up your workflow.

pre-commit

You can use StyLua with pre-commit. There are 3 possible pre-commit hooks available: stylua (which installs via Cargo, requiring the Rust toolchain to be installed), stylua-system (which runs the stylua binary available on the PATH), and stylua-github (which automatically installs the relevant StyLua prebuilt binary from GitHub Actions). Add the following to your .pre-commit-config.yaml file:

- repo: https://github.com/JohnnyMorganz/StyLua
  rev: v0.12.5
  hooks:
    - id: stylua # or stylua-system / stylua-github

Other Installation Methods

• VSCode Extension
• Foreman - Add the following to your foreman.toml file:

stylua = { source = "JohnnyMorganz/stylua", version = "0.12.5" }

• A community maintained package repository. Please note, these packages are maintained by third-parties and we do not control their packaging manifests.

Other Editor Integrations

Note that these integrations require the StyLua binary to already be installed and available on your system.

• Sublime: Sublime Text Package
• Neovim: stylua-nvim / stylua.nvim

Usage

Once installed, pass the files to format to the CLI:

stylua src/ foo.lua bar.lua

This command will format the foo.lua and bar.lua file, and search down the src directory to format any files within it. StyLua can also read from stdin, by using - as the file name.

Glob Filtering

By default, when searching through a directory, StyLua looks for all files matching the glob **/*.lua (or **/*.luau when luau is enabled) to format. You can also specify an explicit glob pattern to match against when searching:

stylua --glob '**/*.luau' -- src # format all files in src matching **/*.luau
stylua -g '*.lua' -g '!*.spec.lua' -- . # format all Lua files except test files ending with `.spec.lua`

Note, if you are using the glob argument, it can take in multiple strings, so -- is required to break between the glob pattern and the files to format. If you explicitly pass a file to StyLua to format, but it doesn't match the glob, it will still be formatted (e.g. stylua foo for file foo containing Lua code)

Filtering using .styluaignore

You can create a .styluaignore file, with a format similar to .gitignore. Any files matching the globs in the ignore file will be ignored by StyLua. For example, for a .styluaignore file with the following contents:

vendor/

running stylua . will ignore the vendor/ directory.

--check: Checking files for formatting

If you want to check that files have been formatted, but not overwrite them, you can pass the --check argument to StyLua. StyLua will search through files as normal, but instead of writing the formatted code back to the file, StyLua will output a diff to stdout. If there are files which haven't been fully formatted, StyLua will exit with status code 1.

--verify: Verifying formatting output

As a safety measure, the --verify flag can be passed to StyLua, and StyLua will verify the output of all formatting before saving it to a file. This re-parses the output following formatting to verify that the AST is still valid and similar to the input AST, flagging any syntax errors or possible code semantics changes. This flag may be useful when adopting StyLua on a large codebase, where not every file can be examined for spurious formatting.

Ignoring parts of a file

If there is a specific statement within your file which you wish to skip formatting on, you can precede it with -- stylua: ignore, and it will be skipped over during formatting. This may be useful when there is a specific formatting style you wish to preserve for a statement. For example:

-- stylua: ignore
local matrix = {
    { 0, 0, 0 },
    { 0, 0, 0 },
    { 0, 0, 0 },
}

You can also disable formatting over a block of code by using -- stylua: ignore start / -- stylua: ignore end respectively.

local foo = true
-- stylua: ignore start
local   bar   =   false
local  baz      = 0
-- stylua: ignore end
local foobar = false

Note: this comment must be preceding a statement (same as -- stylua: ignore), and cannot cross block scope boundaries (i.e. if formatting is disabled, and we exit a block, formatting is automatically re-enabled).

Formatting Ranges

If you only want to format a specific range within a file, you can pass the --range-start <num> and/or --range-end <num> arguments, and only statements within the provided range will be formatted, with the rest ignored. Both arguments are optional, and are inclusive. If an argument is not provided, the start or end of the file will be used instead respectively.

Currently, only whole statements lying withing the range are formatted. If part of the statement is outside of the range, the statement will be ignored.

Configuration

StyLua is opinionated, so only a few options are provided.

Finding the configuration

By default, the CLI will search for a stylua.toml or .stylua.toml file in the current working directory. If its not found, the default configuration will be used. You can pass your own path using the --config-path argument, and the CLI will read the configuration present. If the path provided is not found or the file is malformed, the CLI will exit with an error.

By default, when searching, we do not search any further than the current directory. If you want the CLI to recursively search the parent directories for the config, the --search-parent-directories flag can be used. This will keep searching, until it reaches the root path. If not found, it will look in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/stylua. Note: it is not recommended to use this unless necessary, as it can lead to conflicting formatting: If you have configuration, we recommend keeping the file in your project root so that other developers can use the same configuration, otherwise formatting styles will be different. Likewise, if you work on a project using StyLua, and it uses the base configuration (i.e. no config file present), you may unknowingly use a parent/global configuration if this flag is enabled, and formatting will be unexpected.

StyLua only offers the following options:

Default stylua.toml, note you do not need to explicitly specify each option if you want to use the defaults:

column_width = 120
line_endings = "Unix"
indent_type = "Tabs"
indent_width = 4
quote_style = "AutoPreferDouble"
call_parentheses = "Always"