Pktgen failed to load Lua script - User State for CLI not set for Lua - lua

Question

Running Pktgen with Lua scripts generates a failure User State for CLI not set for Lua.
The command I'm running is:
sudo -E ./usr/local/bin/pktgen --no-telemetry -l 4,6,8,10 -n 4 -a 0000:03:02.0 -m 1024 -- -T -P -m [6:8].0 -f test/hello-world.lua
Which gives the following result:
I have set the environment variables RTE_SDK=/root/Program/dpdk and
RTE_TARGET=x86_64-native-linux-gcc.
The failure comes from cli.c (link to code):
/**
* Load and execute a command file or Lua script file.
*
*/
int
cli_execute_cmdfile(const char *filename)
{
if (filename == NULL)
return 0;
gb_reset_buf(this_cli->gb);
if (strstr(filename, ".lua") || strstr(filename, ".LUA") ) {
if (!this_cli->user_state) {
cli_printf(">>> User State for CLI not set for Lua\n");
return -1;
}
if (lua_dofile) {
/* Execute the Lua script file. */
if (lua_dofile(this_cli->user_state, filename) != 0)
return -1;
} else
cli_printf(">>> Lua is not enabled in configuration!\n");
} else {
FILE *fd;
char buff[256];
fd = fopen(filename, "r");
if (fd == NULL)
return -1;
/* Read and feed the lines to the cmdline parser. */
while (fgets(buff, sizeof(buff), fd))
cli_input(buff, strlen(buff));
fclose(fd);
}
return 0;
}
So it would seem this_cli->user_state is not set, but how do you set it?
I have looked through the documentation for CLI, but it doesn't mention setting any user state from what I can see.
Update:
After having installed Lua and cmake, I ran meson -Denable_lua=true build which worked fine. But when I run ninja -C build I receive this error:

Answer 1

user_state is set in pktgen-main.c, but within a #ifdef LUA_ENABLED section.
Looking at meson_options.txt, which is at the base directory of a pktgen extraction, it contains:
option('enable_lua', type: 'boolean', value: false, description: 'Enable Lua support')
That means that you must enable Lua support when building (after installing dependencies, as shown below):
meson -Denable_lua=true build
This is going to require a few more dependencies, so you may have to install them, e.g. in Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install cmake
And then installing Lua - I had to install it from source as per the instructions, because installing it with Ubuntu's package manager apt didn't give me the library that was needed:
curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.4.4.tar.gz
tar zxf lua-5.4.4.tar.gz
cd lua-5.4.4
make all test
sudo make install