Lua Eval Command

Evaluate Lua code in the daemon’s plugin runtime — the same long-lived VM that plugins and your init.lua run in, so cru APIs are available and globals persist between invocations. The code is sent to the running daemon over the lua.eval RPC and evaluated there, not in the CLI process.

Synopsis

cru lua <code>
cru lua '=<expr>'
cru lua --file <path>
echo 'print(42)' | cru lua -

Argument / Option	Description
<code>	Lua code to evaluate, or - to read from stdin
--file <path>	Read Lua code from a file instead; conflicts with <code>

A leading = turns the input into an expression (the daemon prepends return , the Neovim convention): cru lua '=1+1' prints 2, cru lua '=cru' dumps the API namespace. With neither code nor --file, the command errors.

Output

The daemon returns a string rendering of the result: booleans and numbers as-is, strings unquoted, tables pretty-printed as JSON, other types as <typename>. A nil result prints nothing. Lua errors come back as RPC errors and fail the command, as does a daemon whose Lua runtime is not initialized (plugins disabled).

Relationship to the TUI :lua command

Inside cru chat, :lua <expr> and its shorthand := <expr> go through the same lua.eval RPC against the same VM — cru lua is that command available from a shell. State is shared: a global you set from the TUI is visible to cru lua and vice versa, because there is one plugin runtime per daemon.

Note that lua.eval executes arbitrary code inside the daemon. The daemon socket is per-user with 0700 permissions, so this is same-user access only.

See Also

• Index — full CLI command reference