FiveM supports the general purpose programming language Lua as one of its scripting languages. Lua is a very easy language to learn, simple to use and fast to write. To use Lua, just use .lua in your scripts file extensions.

Using Lua

To use Lua in your scripts, simply use the .lua file extension. No additional configuration is required.

Compile-time hashes

Because you might often have to deal with ‘Jenkins one-at-a-time’ hashes in GTA/RAGE, the Lua runtime has been extended to have support for compile-time generation of hash keys, similar to GET_HASH_KEY, however with zero runtime overhead.

For example:

-- getting
RequestModel(`adder`)

-- comparing
if GetEntityModel(vehicle) == `buzzard` then
  print("Indeed, it's a Buzzard.")
end

-- printing
print(`a_m_y_skater_01`)

Vectors & quaternions

FiveM supports first-class vectors and quaternions in Lua. Vectors and quaternions are incredibly useful to represent things like positions, rotations or even colors. For performance reasons, vectors and quaternions are real data types in CfxLua, just like booleans, numbers and strings are.

Many native functions return and accept vectors too. They’re commonly used for world positions and standard euler rotations, so use them whenever you can. More about there here.

For usage and examples see their respective docs:

• quat
• vector2
• vector3
• vector4

Using natives

Native commands are mapped to global JavaScript functions with names similar to the Lua natives mapping. Definitions for them are located at path\to\fivem\FiveM.app\citizen\scripting\v8\natives_universal.d.ts.

For automatic completion of the FiveM API methods and mapped native functions we recommend using the official NPM packages @citizenfx/client and @citizenfx/server, respectively.

Example:

// The native command GET_PLAYER_PED translates to the following:
GetPlayerPed(-1);

Using Node.js APIs

FiveM includes a customized version of Node.js 16.x on the server. You can simply use require in server scripts, and it’ll resolve the package either from Node.js built-ins, or the node_modules/ folder in your resource directory.

To automatically install and update a package.json with Yarn on launch, make sure the yarn resource is running before starting your resource, or preferably add it as a dependency in your resource manifest.