Luakit is a highly configurable browser framework based on the WebKit web content engine and the GTK+ toolkit. It is very fast, extensible with Lua, and licensed under the GNU GPLv3 license. It is primarily targeted at power users, developers and anyone who wants to have fine-grained control over their web browser’s behaviour and interface.
While switching to the WebKit 2 API means a vastly improved security situation, not all distributions of Linux package the most up-to-date version of WebKitGTK+, and several package very outdated versions that have many known vulnerabilities. As of February 2017, Arch, Fedora, and Ubuntu all have the latest version of WebKitGTK+; but Debian, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE ship outdated and vulnerable versions in their stable channel. See here for more details.
If you use Luakit for browsing, it is your responsibility to ensure that your distribution packages an up-to-date version of WebKitGTK+!
First, install the Windows Subsystem for Linux if you have not already done so, as WebKitGTK+ does not natively support Windows.
The default Linux system is based on Ubuntu “Trusty”; upgrade your system to Ubuntu “Xenial” by running the following command at the Linux terminal:
do-release-upgradeThis is required due to a missing dependency (Lua File System) in the earlier version of Ubuntu.
Download, build, and install luakit from source, following the instructions below.
Arch Linux users can install the luakit-git package from the AUR.
Other users will need to download and build from source. A Debian package is in the works. Luakit contains only around 9000 lines of code, so this process is usually very fast.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD users can install the luakit
package.
Ensure you have the following required dependencies installed:
Download the latest development version: zip, tar. Alternatively, clone the project with Git by running:
git clone git://github.com/luakit/luakit
Change into the target directory and run make install
. You will probably also want to customize the prefix, which is /usr/local
by default.
Full instructions on building Luakit are available in the README.md
file.
After successfully building and installing luakit, run luakit
from the command line or launch luakit from your application launcher.
If you run into trouble installing luakit, or if you find a bug, please open an issue at the GitHub issue tracker, and we'll be happy to help you!
The #luakit
IRC channel is also a great place to ask questions; join #luakit
on the OFTC network.