I've started experimenting with custom APIs, and I'm unsure of the best way to organize and reference them. Where is the latest or best documentation for this? (That's assuming something currently exists.)

I read on wiki.computercraft.cc that os.loadAPI is deprecated, and that require is the preferred function. However, I'm not finding any documentation for that second function which isn't several years old.

I'm also noticing behavior that I don't expect, e.g., I can't figure out how to use prefixes before my function names, like how myAPI precedes hello in myAPI.hello(). Or perhaps this is no longer possible? In which case, I'm confused about how to avoid namespace conflicts.

BTW, I'm using CC:T 1.85.0 with MC 1.12.2.

It sounds like we need to write a wiki page about writing APIs with require().

The general gist of require is that your API function returns a table (e.g. return myAPI) at the end of the file, and then in other files you can import it with local myAPI = require("myAPI").

Here's an example API:

myAPI.lua

local myAPI = {} -- create our API table

function myAPI.hello() -- create functions as you like
    return "Hello, world!"
end

-- return (or export) our API for require:
return myAPI

Using the API:

test.lua

-- import our API:
local myAPI = require("myAPI")

print(myAPI.hello()) -- Hello, world!

Edit: the best documentation about require is the lua manual. Require is not specific to CC, whereas os.loadAPI is (and is also deprecated).

As @Lemmmy says, require is built-in to Lua, and so I didn't really think to document it. There's a pretty nice explanation on the Lua users wiki, which goes into a bit more detail about the package library too.

It'd be good to get a wiki article explaining the difference between os.loadAPI and require, and describing how to update programs/libraries to use require. Probably worth also adding a page on require, there's a lot of misconceptions about it.

I've written some documentation require for the wiki. It hopefully covers most questions and issues people have with require, though I'd definitely appreciate some feedback from others. It would also be worth writing a separate page about converting APIs to use require, if someone wants to pick that up.

My main feedback is that the wiki inserts a page-long list of functions, so if I visited the wiki I would miss most of your documentation, since that looks like the end. Not sure if there's anything you can easily do about it?

There is more below that wall of links? I never realized, I thought the wiki was nearly empty :O.

I had move the links at the end of the page now. If you find another problem, you can help the wiki and fix it self. A wiki lives from user who create and edit pages.

Thanks, couldn't figure out what was even generating that :)

This is generated by the API doc template. You have to put all the content of the side inside the description.