Lua Minifier

About this tool

Lua is flexible about whitespace, which makes it a good fit for minification: comments, blank lines and indentation can usually disappear without changing how the chunk runs. This tool scans Lua as Lua tokens instead of doing a blind regular-expression replace, so quoted strings, long strings, long-bracket levels, shebangs and tricky token boundaries survive.

Use it when you need a smaller plugin, game script, embedded config chunk or LuaJIT helper. The default output strips comments and joins the script onto one line. Turn on local renaming when you want a smaller payload and the script does not inspect its own local names with debug APIs.

Worked example

Input:

--! @license MIT
local function greet(name)
  -- build a greeting
  local message = "hello, " .. name
  print(message)
end

greet("Ada")

With Strip Lua comments and Preserve license / copyright banners enabled, the output keeps the banner and removes the internal comment and spacing:

--! @license MIT
local function greet(name)local message="hello, "..name print(message)end greet("Ada")

If Rename locals and parameters to short aliases is enabled, local variables and parameters are shortened while globals, fields, method names and string contents are left alone.

Limits and edge cases

• The transform is token-aware, not a full Lua AST optimizer. It does not fold constants, reorder code, remove dead branches or encode strings.
• Local renaming is opt-in and refuses when block structure does not balance. Minification without renaming is still forgiving for incomplete snippets.
• --!, @license, @preserve and @copyright comments are kept by default; disable the banner option to strip them too.
• line_breaks = keep keeps one output line per non-empty source line, useful when runtime error line numbers matter more than the smallest possible result.
• Code that reflects over local names with debug.getlocal, builds code strings that mention local names, or depends on exact source text should not use local renaming.

FAQ