The AOTUS library provides a Fortran wrapper around the C-API of the Lua scripting language, allowing a convenient usage of Lua scripts as configuration files in Fortran applications.

Please visit the FORD generated documentation for more information on its usage and details.

We are using Waf as build system.

Installing aotus from the sources should be as simple as:

./waf configure install

If you want to select a specific Fortran compiler, set the environment variable FC. To select a specific C compiler, set the environment variable CC.

The Fortran compiler flags are set with the help of fcopts, which provide a set of compiler flag combinations for various compilers. They are found in the fortran_compiler.py file in the root directory of the project.

By running:

./waf --help

you get a list of available options to the waf script. Use the --prefix= to set the directory into which AOTUS should be installed.

If you do not want to use waf for the actual compilation of the project, you can generate a Makefile with waf by running the dump command. To resemble more closely the usual auto-tool steps, there is a configure script to run the configuration phase of waf and the generation of the Makefile. This will create a Makefile in the build subdirectory, so you can compile aotus with:

./configure
cd build
make

You can get a list of available options by running

./configure --help

For your convenience the Lua library is included in version 5.4.8 (released 2025-05-21). Its objects are completely gathered into the final libaotus library, so you only need to link against this single static library to gain the configuration features of Aotus in your Fortran application.

The default build process will also create some unit test executables and execute them to ensure functionality of the various parts in the library.

The documentation can be built with FORD by running:

ford aot_mainpage.md

This will build a docu directory with the resulting documentation. Note that this requires FORD to be installed beforehand.

This documentation is also available online.

There is an example program built, called aotus_sample, which you will find in the build directory. It can be used with the provided config.lua in the sample directory, where you also find the source of this small program.

The central module of this library is the aotus_module. Its documentation along with the Aotus overview are and the small example are good starting points.