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L5 is free open source software available for Linux, Mac, Windows, Android and iOS.

L5 is a library built on top of the framework LÖVE (also called Love2d).

To write code for L5 you need to install Love2d and the single L5.lua library file.

Install

  1. Download and install Love2d with the free installer
  2. Download the L5 Starter project and extract it (double-click on Mac, right-click "Extract All..." on Windows)
  3. Open main.lua in any text editor and begin coding!
  4. Drag the L5-starter folder onto the Love2d application to run your program, or run from an IDE or command line for access to console messages

Downloads

This compressed folder contains the L5.lua library, a starter main.lua file (with require('L5') already included), and a README.

Download L5 Starter project

Individual Downloads

Latest version: Download L5.lua

Stable release (v0.1.3): Download L5.lua v0.1.3

Source code

The L5 repository is accessible for anyone interested in viewing or modifying the L5 source code. See contributing for ways to contribute to the library or this site.

Offline Documentation

This L5 documentation site is available for download to run offline, with or without images.

After downloading, extract the ZIP and serve the folder with a local web server. For a quick local server, navigate to the extracted folder in your command line and run python -m http.server (Python 3) or python -m SimpleHTTPServer (Python 2).

Running your program

The easiest way to run your L5 program is to drag the folder containing your main.lua onto the Love2d application. But to see error messages and printing in the console you will want to run from an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or command line. Here are platform-specific details:

Linux

In the Terminal, you can run love path/to/main.lua. Or if you are in the folder with your program love . to launch.

Mac

Drag and drop the folder holding L5.lua and your main.lua onto the Love application.

OR

If you are comfortable navigating in the Terminal and Love is installed in your applications folder you can run:

open -n -a love "~/path/to/my-program"

This will not send debugging/print information to the Terminal, such as any describe() text. To see printed text you need to run the Love program from Applications, like this:

/Applications/love.app/Contents/MacOS/love ~/path/to/my-program

You can set up an alias in your Terminal session to call the binary when you use love by adding an alias to your ~/.zshrc file (Z shell configuration file).

Open the file with:

open -a TextEdit ~/.zshrc

You may have to run

touch ~/.zshrc

first if the file does not yet exist.

Then paste in the following code and save the file:

# alias to love
alias love="/Applications/love.app/Contents/MacOS/love"

Now you can call love from the command line like Linux and Windows:

love ~/path/to/my-program

If this doesn't works you should reload the .zshrc file like this:

source ~/.zshrc

and try it again.

Windows

The easiest way to run your program is to drag the folder onto either love.exe or a shortcut to love.exe. Remember to drag the folder containing main.lua, and not main.lua itself.

However, to see print messages and error output in the console (helpful when coding and debugging), you'll want to use an IDE or run from the command line. IDEs such as ZeroBrane Studio, Sublime Text, VS Code, Notepad++, and SciTE all support launching LÖVE programs (the underlying framework used by L5), though may require some configuration.

Alternatively, you can launch from the command line with the --console flag:

"C:\Program Files\LOVE\love.exe" --console "C:\Users\<YourUsername>\Desktop\L5-starter"

Replace <YourUsername> and Desktop\L5-starter with your actual username and the location of your program folder.

Installation instructions adapted from Love2d wiki: Getting Started, GNU Free Documentation License 1.3.