For normal use, rocks repositories are manipulated by the luarocks command-line tool. LuaRocks fetches rocks from one kind of repository -- rocks servers -- and installs them into another kind of repository -- rocks trees.

Generally speaking, a rocks repository is a directory containing rocks and/or rockspecs, and a manifest file which catalogs the rocks contained therein. Rocks servers may contain packed rocks and rockspecs, and may be located in remote (HTTP or FTP) URLs or paths in the local filesystem. Rocks trees can contain only unpacked (installed) rocks, and are always local.

LuaRocks can be configured to use multiple rocks trees and multiple rocks servers. See the Config file format for details and the reference for the luarocks command-line tool for details.

Publishing a repository as a rocks server consists of making a directory containing rocks and a manifest file available online. A manifest file can be created using the make-manifest command of the luarocks-admin command-line tool, included in LuaRocks. For the rocks tree, the manifest file is updated automatically by LuaRocks.

A rocks tree has this (default) layout;

 {base}                (base rocks tree directory)
  ├── bin              (deployment of command line scripts)
  ├── lib
  │    ├── luarocks
  │    │    └── rocks  (contains manifest and sub-dirs with rocks)
  │    │
  │    └── lua
  │         └── 5.1    (deployment of binary modules)
  │
  └── share
       └── lua
            └── 5.1    (deployment of Lua modules)

Whenever LuaRocks installs a rock it will install them (the executable parts) in the deployment directories. These directories should be included in your system path, LUA_PATH, and LUA_CPATH to be able to require the modules from your own scripts or use the command line scripts from a prompt. Other included elements (see copy_directories in rockspec), including the manifest and rockspecs, will be stored in the base/lib/luarocks/rocks.

When multiple versions of the same rock are being installed, the older ones in the deployment directories will be renamed to a name including the version. The luarocks.loader module will be able to load the proper version of the modules despite the changed names.