is it possible to call lua functions defined in other lua scripts in redis?

Question

I have tried to declare a function without the local keyword and then call that function from anther script but it gives me an error when I run the command.

Answer 1

I'm going to be contrary to the accepted answer, because the accepted answer is wrong.

While you can't explicitly define named functions, you can call any script that you can call with EVALSHA. More specifically, all of the Lua scripts that you have explicitly defined via SCRIPT LOAD or implicitly via EVAL are available in the global Lua namespace at f_ (until/unless you call SCRIPT FLUSH), which you can call any time.

The problem that you run into is that the functions are defined as taking no arguments, and the KEYS and ARGV tables are actually globals. So if you want to be able to communicate between Lua scripts, you either need to mangle your KEYS and ARGV tables, or you need to use the standard Redis keyspace for communication between your functions.

127.0.0.1:6379> script load "return {KEYS[1], ARGV[1]}"
"d006f1a90249474274c76f5be725b8f5804a346b"
127.0.0.1:6379> eval "return f_d006f1a90249474274c76f5be725b8f5804a346b()" 1 "hello" "world"
1) "hello"
2) "world"
127.0.0.1:6379> eval "KEYS[1] = 'blah!'; return f_d006f1a90249474274c76f5be725b8f5804a346b()" 1 "hello" "world"
1) "blah!"
2) "world"
127.0.0.1:6379>

All of this said, this is in complete violation of spec, and is entirely possible to stop working in strange ways if you attempt to run this in a Redis cluster scenario.