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situation, not all distributions of Linux package the most up-to-date version of WebKitGTK+, and several package very outdated versions that have many known vulnerabilities.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 September 2019, Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, and Ubuntu all have the latest version of WebKitGTK+, but OpenSUSE ships an outdated and vulnerable version in their stable channel.
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.
Download, build, and install luakit from source, following the instructions below.
Arch Linux users can install the luakit community package or 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.
When installing from source, OpenBSD users should build with clang instead of GCC, as the GCC version shipped with OpenBSD is outdated and its use will result in compilation errors.
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.