NAME

fennel - a lisp programming language that runs on Lua

SYNOPSIS

fennel [--repl] | [--compile filename] | [--eval source] | [filename] [args ...]

DESCRIPTION

This manual page documents briefly the fennel command.

fennel is the main entry point for Fennel, a lisp programming language that runs on Lua runtimes. With no options or arguments, it runs an interactive Read-Eval-Print loop (REPL).

Given a filename as its first argument, it runs that file and passes it the subsequent arguments. Ahead-of-time compilation can be invoked with the --compile flag, while short snippets can be evaluated with the --eval argument.

OPTIONS

A summary of options is included below.

--repl: Start an interactive repl session. This is the default when given no arguments.
--compile filename: Perform ahead-of-time compilation on the provided file and write the Lua output to standard out.
--eval source: Evaluate a given piece of source code and print the result.
--no-searcher: When running a repl or a file, fennel.searcher is installed by default so that the require function can load Fennel files in addition to Lua files. This flag disables that behavior. Has no effect for ahead-of-time compilation.
--add-package-path path: Add the given path to package.path so that the require function will know to look there when searching for Lua modules.
--add-fennel-path path: Same as above, but for Fennel's path used when searching for Fennel modules.
--globals VAR1[,VAR2...]: Allow VAR1, VAR2, etc as globals in addition to the standard set of globals. This enables strict global checking even in ahead-of-time compilation where it otherwise would be disabled. Use "*" to disable globals checking.
--globals-only VAR1[,VAR2...]: Same as above, but without the inclusion of the standard set of globals.
--require-as-include: Instead of loading required modules at runtime, compile them inline into the main file being compiled. Only useful during ahead-of-time compilation.
--assert-as-repl: Calls to the built-in function assert from Fennel will be replaced with calls to assert-repl so that when the assertion fails, a REPL will be started in which you can interactively debug.
--use-bit-lib: Compile bitwise operations to use LuaJIT's bitop library instead of Lua 5.3+ bitwise operators.
--load FILE: Load the specified file before any command is run.
--compile-binary FILE OUT LUA_LIB LUA_DIR: Compile FILE to a standalone binary OUT using LUA_LIB and the Lua header files in LUA_DIR. See --compile-binary --help for details.
--no-compiler-sandbox: Do not limit compiler environment (used in macros) to minimal sandbox.
--keywords KEYWORD1[,KEYWORD2...]: Treat these symbols as reserved Lua keywords.
-h, --help: Print a help message and exit
-v, --version: Print the version number and exit

Use the NO_COLOR environment variable to disable escape codes in error messages.

COMMUNITY

The mailing list is at https://lists.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel while the issue tracker is at https://todo.sr.ht/~technomancy/fennel. Most discussion happens on the #fennel channel of Libera chat.

AUTHORS

Calvin Rose and Phil Hagelberg and contributors: https://github.com/bakpakin/Fennel/graphs/contributors