Lua Support in Maguyva: Code Graphs for Games, Plugins, and OpenResty

Where Lua trips up shallow AI tools

Lua has no class keyword. Objects are tables, methods are functions stored in them, and inheritance is a setmetatable call. A module is whatever require returns. The structure is real, but it lives in conventions that text search does not understand.

Maguyva reads those conventions as structure, so an agent can ask who calls a method or which tables extend a base and get a direct answer.

What Maguyva extracts in Lua

Maguyva covers .lua files. Function declarations, local function definitions, and function expressions are extracted, and colon methods such as function Account:deposit() are attributed to their owning table, Account. Method chains are followed call by call, and calls on self stay tied to the enclosing object.

Lua’s conventions map onto relationships:

• require, dofile, and loadfile record imports.
• A module-level setmetatable call records inheritance.
• ClassName:new(), ClassName.new(), and setmetatable({...}, ClassName) count as instantiation.
• error() records a throw, and pcall and xpcall record a catch.

The graph also records reads and writes and control flow.

Example agent prompts

• “Who calls Inventory:addItem, and from which scripts?” (find_symbol, then dependency_search incoming)
• “Which modules require util.http?” (dependency_search)
• “Trace what happens when the player takes damage.” (get_task_context)

Known limits

• About 150 names are filtered from relationships: the Lua standard library (string, table, math, io, os, coroutine, debug, and utf8) plus the Neovim vim.* and OpenResty ngx.* APIs. Calls into those APIs are not graph edges, so use text_pattern_search to find them.
• Because modules and classes are built from ordinary calls and tables, the classes and imports presets in structural_search select nothing for Lua. Use find_symbol or text_pattern_search instead.
• Lua has no interfaces or type annotations, so interface-implementation and type-reference relationships are marked not applicable.

Next steps

Connect a repository with the quickstart, then check the support matrix on the compatibility page. For engines that embed Lua in native code, read the C guide too.