Quickstart

Before you start

You need a Wapka site with the Lua engine enabled. Create one or switch an existing site:

1. Go to your site overview → Site Settings
2. Under Engine, select Lua Engine
3. Scroll down to lua_init — this is where your script lives

Hello Wapka

Paste this into lua_init and click Save:

local app = framework()

app:get("/", function(ctx)
    return { message = "Hello, Wapka!" }
end)

Open your site in a browser. You'll see:

{ "message": "Hello, Wapka!" }

You just built a JSON API in 4 lines. No server setup, no deployment pipeline, no configuration.

Adding a second route

local app = framework()

app:get("/", function(ctx)
    return { message = "Home page" }
end)

app:get("/about", function(ctx)
    return {
        title = "About Us",
        team = { "Alice", "Bob", "Charlie" },
        founded = 2024
    }
end)

Visit /about — you'll see the team data as JSON.

Understanding what happened

1. framework() created your app
2. app:get("/", handler) said "when someone visits /, run this function"
3. Your handler returned a Lua table — Wapka automatically converted it to JSON
4. The response was sent with Content-Type: application/json

No routing config file. No web server setup. Just Lua.

What can a handler return?

Debugging

Stuck? Use print() and dump():

app:get("/debug", function(ctx)
    print("Someone visited /debug")
    dump(req.headers)       -- see all request headers
    dump(env)               -- see environment info
    return { ok = true }
end)

In debug mode (APP_DEBUG=true), the output appears in the response. In production, it's silently discarded.

Where to go from here

Tip: You can edit lua_init anytime. Changes go live immediately — no restart needed.