Installation

Install Luau Engine Studio and the luauengine command-line tools on Windows, macOS or Linux.

Luau Engine ships as two pieces that install together:

Luau Engine Studio — the editor, forked from Roblox Studio.
luauengine — the command-line toolchain used for builds, tests and publishing. The editor shells out to it, and so can your CI.

System requirements#

	Minimum	Recommended
OS	Windows 10 20H2, macOS 12, Ubuntu 20.04	Windows 11, macOS 14, Ubuntu 24.04
CPU	x86-64 with SSE4.2, or ARM64	6+ cores
Memory	8 GB	16 GB
GPU	Direct3D 11 / Metal 2 / Vulkan 1.1	Anything from the last five years
Disk	4 GB	12 GB with build caches

Windows#

Download the installer from the downloads page and run it, or use winget:

winget install LuauEngine.Studio

A portable build is also published as a .zip if you would rather not run an installer — unpack it anywhere and run LuauEngineStudio.exe.

macOS#

brew install --cask luau-engine

Or download the .dmg and drag Luau Engine Studio to Applications. The release builds are signed and notarised, so Gatekeeper will not prompt.

Linux#

The AppImage runs on any reasonably current distribution:

curl -LO https://luauengine.org/dl/latest/LuauEngineStudio-x86_64.AppImage
chmod +x LuauEngineStudio-x86_64.AppImage
./LuauEngineStudio-x86_64.AppImage

Distribution packages are also published for Debian/Ubuntu (.deb) and Fedora (.rpm). On a bare server where you only need the toolchain, install the CLI on its own:

curl -fsSL https://luauengine.org/install.sh | sh

That script drops a single static luauengine binary into ~/.luauengine/bin and prints the line to add to your shell profile.

Verify what you downloaded

Every release publishes SHA256SUMS and a detached signature alongside the binaries. Check them before installing on anything you care about:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing

Confirm the install#

luauengine --version
luauengine doctor

doctor checks the pieces that usually go wrong — graphics backend, toolchain paths, SDKs for any cross-compilation targets you have enabled — and tells you exactly what is missing.

Build from source#

You need CMake 3.24+, a C++20 compiler and Python 3.10+.

git clone https://github.com/Luau-Engine/LuauEngine
cd LuauEngine
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build --parallel

A full build takes roughly 15–40 minutes depending on your machine. cmake --build build --target studio builds only the editor if you do not need the export toolchains.

Updating#

The editor checks for releases on launch and can update itself in place. To pin a version — which you want in CI — use the toolchain manager:

luauengine toolchain install 0.9.4
luauengine toolchain default 0.9.4

Committing a .luauengine-version file to your repository pins every checkout of that project to the same toolchain.

Uninstalling#

Windows: remove Luau Engine Studio from Installed apps. macOS: brew uninstall --cask luau-engine, or drag the app to the Bin. Linux: delete the AppImage, or use your package manager.

User data lives in %LOCALAPPDATA%\LuauEngine on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/LuauEngine on macOS and ~/.local/share/luauengine on Linux. Removing it clears settings, plugins and build caches.