Lilush is a couple of things. First of all, lilush is a statically compiled for Linux LuaJIT interpreter that comes bundled with a curated collection of Lua modules and C libraries for

• File system operations
• Process manipulation
• TCP/UDP networking with SSL support; HTTP(S) client, HTTP(S)/1.1 server
• Modern cryptography
• Terminal I/O with UTF-8 support, styling with TSS (Terminal Style Sheets)
• A set of terminal widgets for use in CLI apps
• djot processing/rendering
• Redis protocol support
• Embedded WireGuard and ACMEv2 clients
• JSON, Base64, HMAC, ...

For networking, lilush uses LuaSocketWolfSSL library, which is based on Luasocket and LuaSec modules merged into one and refactored to work seamlessly with WolfSSL. WolfSSL is also statically compiled and incorporated into the lilush binary.

The binary is fewer than 2MB, and should work fine on any x86_64 Linux system. It's also a nice addition to a FROM scratch docker container, as lilush can be used as a busybox replacement.

And to top it off, lilush can compile your Lua code into a static binary too!¹

Secondly, to showcase most features of its bundled modules, lilush includes a modular Linux Shell (as in Bash, Csh or Fish), suprisingly called Lilush Shell, which

• provides a sleek CLI interface straight out of the box:

  • Pre-configured prompts: host, user, dir, git, aws, k8s, python venv
  • Command completions, completions scrolling
  • Smart directory navigation and history search, similar to McFly and zoxide
  • Terminal graphics support

• has some handy shell builtins like kat (file viewer + pager), netstat, dig, wgcli, etc.

• supports styling with the help of TSS

• is easily extendable with plugins

• can do fortune telling and probably one day will save the humanity =)

::: NotaBene

Lilush Shell relies on Kitty's keyboard protocol, thus will only work in terminal emulators that support this protocol, e.g. kitty, foot, alacritty, konsole...

:::

There are a couple of side projects, built upon lilush, that might be of interest:

• RELIW is an HTTP server & framework with automatic SSL certifcates management (similar to Caddy).
• Circada is an IRC server & client bundle

The easiest way is just to build with docker and then copy the binary from the container:

git clone https://github.com/epicfilemcnulty/lilush
cd lilush
ln -s dockerfiles/lilush Dockerfile
docker build -t lilush .
docker cp $(docker create --name lilush lilush):/usr/bin/lilush .
docker rm lilush

If you want to build on a host system, see the Dockerfile as a reference for building details.

Right now the project is certainly in beta.

• Not all planned features have been implemented
• Documentation is lagging behind
• No proper testing has been done
• There are known bugs
• There are most certainly yet undiscovered bugs, because no proper testing has been done.

When most of the above issues are resolved, the 1.0.0 version will be released. But quite a lot of things might be heavily refactored or removed along the way to the 1.0.0 version, so beware and use at your own risk.

After 1.0.0 version release the project will abide by the semantic versioning promises, but until then all bets are off. Meaning that there might be breaking changes of the core lilush modules' API even between, say, 0.5.x and 0.6.x. Or worse. But let's hope it won't come to that.