Selene Processor

Purpose

Lints Lua files using selene, a Lua linter written in Rust. It is the Rust alternative to the luacheck processor: a single binary that needs no Lua runtime and no LuaRocks.

How It Works

Discovers .lua files under src_dirs, runs selene on them, and records success in the cache. selene exits non-zero on warnings as well as errors, so any finding fails the product, as with luacheck.

This processor supports batch mode, allowing multiple files to be checked in a single selene invocation for better performance.

If selene.toml exists in the project root, it is automatically added as an extra input so that configuration changes trigger rebuilds.

Migrating from luacheck

selene is a different linter, not a port of luacheck, so a repo moving over writes a selene.toml and expects different findings:

• Lua version. selene parses Lua 5.1 (and Luau). Its 0.32.0 release binary has no Lua 5.4 standard library at all, and std = "lua52" or "lua53" prints “feature for it is not enabled” and still parses 5.1, so //, bitwise operators, goto and <const> are parse errors. A source build with selene-lib’s lua53/lua54 features enabled behaves the same. Code written for Lua 5.3/5.4 stays on luacheck.
• Host globals. A global the program gets from its host (vim, pandoc) is declared in a custom standard library file next to selene.toml (std = "lua51+neovim" reads neovim.yml, which starts base: lua51 and lists globals:), not on the command line as with luacheck’s --globals.
• Globals. Assigning a global at the top level is a warning (unscoped_variables), and a global nothing in the same file reads is unused_variable. Globals one file defines and another reads through dofile are undefined_variable errors in the reading file: selene checks each file on its own and does not follow dofile. There is no counterpart of luacheck’s allow_defined_top.
• Scope. One selene.toml covers the whole project; luacheck’s per-directory files["dir"] overrides have no equivalent. Narrower exceptions are comments in the source: -- selene: allow(lint_name) for the next statement, --# selene: allow(lint_name) for the whole file.

Source Files

• Input: **/*.lua
• Output: none (checker)

The default src_dirs is empty, so a stanza with no src_dirs or src_files checks nothing: name the directories ([""] for the whole project) or files to check.

Configuration

[processor.checker.selene]
src_dirs = ["config"]
args = []
dep_inputs = []

Installation

rsconstruct tool install downloads the Linux binary from the selene GitHub release (a zip, extracted with unzip). The crate is the fallback.

Batch support

The tool accepts multiple files on the command line. When batching is enabled (default), rsconstruct passes all files in a single invocation for better performance.

Clean behavior

This processor is a Checker — rsconstruct clean outputs is a no-op for it (checkers produce no outputs). See Clean behavior and rsconstruct clean.