I'm sorry if I'm missing something obvious that I should already know.
There's nothing you should already know, but you should be able to look up that information by yourself. Installation and distribution are far beyond the scope of this mailing-list dedicated to LuaTeX developers (and there is a user list, see http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/luatex). As for your question, you have to understand the basics of kpathsea, the file lookup library used by most implementations of TeX, and web2c, the actual TeX implementation. Documentation should be available as part of your TeX distribution (if you're using TeX Live, use texdoc to locate documentation), and also online. Since you seem to want to use the latest LuaTeX revision without going through any distribution, you will have to build a tiny distribution of your own around LuaTeX that suits your needs. What I've been using for three years in order to test LuaTeX is to have the latest LuaTeX binary in some directory, to place symbolic links pointing to TeX Live's texmf trees two directories higher, and to build the LuaTeX plain format from the directory where the LuaTeX binary resides, using Knuth's original plain.tex file. These days, it's enough to run "./luatex -ini luatex.ini" to generate the format, where luatex.ini contains \input plain \directlua{tex.enableprimitives("", tex.extraprimitives())} \pdfoutput1 \dump You can then use luatex from the directory where it resides. Arthur