[Rspamd-Users] cannot execute /etc/rspamd/custom-ratelimit.lua: attempt to call a nil value

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Wed, 31 Aug 2022, George Asenov wrote:

> I'm trying to write custom ratelimit script but it keeps failing at start 
> with:
> ###########
> lua; ratelimit.lua:852: cannot execute /etc/rspamd/custom-ratelimit.lua: attempt to call a nil value
> ...

I've never in my life written lua code, but seeing an error message
like that would make me ask

"What's at line 852?"

My guess is that it's something with an undefined (nil) value. :)

If there are many things on line 852 capable of taking values you can
try somehow to separate them onto multiple lines.  The error messages
you get might then tell you which of the values caused the problem.

Of course the code you've posted doesn't have anything like 852 lines.
If you think that it really is what's causing the error, first you'll
probably need to find out what other code is wrapped around yours, so
you can count the lines in the same way that the lua interpreter does.

Alternatively you can put some 'do nothing' lines in your code before
(hopefully) the part causing the error, just to see if the line number
in the error message changes.

Generally speaking if you're starting new development from scratch I'd
recommend starting with something very, *very* simple, so that you can
build on something which 'works' - which is usually a lot easier than
trying to fix something which doesn't.  If you started with something
like the code in your post, you could for example comment out lots of
it until you get something which at least runs, even if it doesn't do
what you want when it does.  Then you can incrementally uncomment the
commented parts, so you gradually approach the objective, and errors
are revealed as you uncomment more or less one line of code at a time.

Sorry not to be more help than that.

-- 

73,
Ged.