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This guide will help you obfuscate your first Lua script with IronBrew 2.

​
Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have:
  • IronBrew 2 CLI installed (installation guide)
  • A Lua 5.1 script to obfuscate
  • luac and luajit available in your PATH

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Obfuscate your first script

1

Create a test Lua script

Create a simple Lua script to test the obfuscator:
test.lua
-- Simple test script
local function greet(name)
    return "Hello, " .. name .. "!"
end

local message = greet("World")
print(message)

-- Some basic math
local sum = 0
for i = 1, 10 do
    sum = sum + i
end
print("Sum:", sum)
2

Run the obfuscator

Execute IronBrew 2 CLI with your script as input:
./IronBrew2CLI test.lua
You should see output similar to:
Checking file...
Stripping comments...
Compiling...
Obfuscating...
Serializing...
Minifying...
Watermark...
Done!
3

Check the output

IronBrew 2 creates an out.lua file containing your obfuscated code:
ls -lh out.lua
The output file will be significantly larger than the input due to the VM wrapper and obfuscation layers.
4

Test the obfuscated script

Run the obfuscated script to verify it works correctly:
lua out.lua
Expected output:
Hello, World!
Sum:    55
The obfuscated code produces identical results to the original script.

​
What happened?

IronBrew 2 transformed your Lua script through several stages:
1

Comment stripping

Removes comments using LuaSrcDiet while preserving code structure
2

String encryption

Encrypts string constants (if enabled in settings)
3

Bytecode compilation

Compiles the Lua source to Lua 5.1 bytecode using luac
4

Bytecode deserialization

Parses the bytecode into an internal representation (Chunk, Instruction objects)
5

Control flow obfuscation

Applies control flow transformations to make the code harder to analyze
6

VM generation

Wraps the bytecode in a custom virtual machine with randomized instruction encoding
7

Minification

Compresses the output using LuaSrcDiet with maximum optimization

​
Default configuration

The CLI uses these default settings from ObfuscationSettings:
ObfuscationSettings (default)
EncryptStrings = false
EncryptImportantStrings = false
ControlFlow = true
BytecodeCompress = true
DecryptTableLen = 500
PreserveLineInfo = false
Mutate = true
SuperOperators = true
MaxMegaSuperOperators = 120
MaxMiniSuperOperators = 120
MaxMutations = 200
The default configuration provides strong obfuscation with good performance. Control flow obfuscation, mutations, and super operators are all enabled by default.

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Next steps

CLI Reference

Learn about all CLI options and how to customize obfuscation

Configuration

Understand ObfuscationSettings and fine-tune the obfuscation process

Core Concepts

Dive deep into how VM-based obfuscation works

API Reference

Use IronBrew 2 programmatically in your C# projects

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Common issues

Make sure luac is installed and available in your PATH:
which luac
luac -v
Install Lua 5.1 if needed. See the installation guide for platform-specific instructions.
IronBrew 2 uses LuaJIT for preprocessing. Install it:
Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install luajit
macOS
brew install luajit
The VM wrapper adds significant overhead. This is normal for VM-based obfuscation. To reduce size:
  • Disable string encryption
  • Reduce MaxMegaSuperOperators and MaxMiniSuperOperators
  • Set BytecodeCompress = true (default)
VM-based obfuscation adds runtime overhead. For better performance:
  • Reduce MaxMutations
  • Disable ControlFlow for performance-critical sections
  • Use selective obfuscation on sensitive code only

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