Any way to use a Lua package like socket.http in extension?

[dmonder]

Description

I would like to create a short code to include some text from a web API call but can't seem to figure out how to load the Lua socket.http package in Quarto. Is this possible? If so, how do I do it.

Right now, I have the following as the first line in my Lua extension:

local http = require("socket.http")

but this generates the following error:

Error running filter C:/Program Files/Quarto/share/filters/main.lua:
[string "..."]:295: module 'socket.http' not found:
	no field package.preload['socket.http']

[cderv]

The Lua module needs to be available for your extension. Did you try to bundle socket.http in your Extensions ? I believe require in Lua knows how to load a standalone library provide as a file.

More generaly, the feature you want is part of LuaSocket and must be made available somehow (https://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/home.html#download) as this is not part of available Lua API provided by Pandoc or Quarto (https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/lua-api.html)

So I am not sure how, but it needs to be made available for the Lua interpreter.

[dmonder]

I am looking into the LuaSocket source. I did discover that it is at https://lunarmodules.github.io/luasocket/ now.

[nickvigilante]

I had this same question, and I'm not sure if this is useful to you, but my colleague told me about pandoc.mediabag.fetch, which returns the MIME type (or nil) and the response body (or nil) from the URL in question. I tested this out on my local install, and it works like a charm.