luau-teardown

A utility package to clean up resources.

Installation

Add luau-teardown in your dependencies:

yarn add luau-teardown

Or if you are using npm:

npm install luau-teardown

Teardown type

It is important to understand what a Teardown object is first, since this library operates on this type.

A Teardown object can be multiple things:

• A function that takes no arguments and returns nothing (a value of type () -> ())
• An array of Teardown objects
• a nil value
• A thread, which is usually created using the task library

When the global LUA_ENV is equal to "roblox", a Teardown object can also be:

• A RBXScriptConnection, which is what returned by calling Connect on Events
• An Instance

This type is accessible by writing:

local Teardown = require("@pkg/teardown")
type Teardown = Teardown.Teardown

API

teardown

The teardown function takes any amount of Teardown objects and cleans them:

• For functions: calls the function
• a thread value: calls task.cancel with the thread
• For RBXScriptConnection: disconnects the connection
• For Instance: calls Destroy() on the instance
• An array of Teardown objects: teardowns all Teardown elements
• a nil value: does nothing

For example, if you want to disconnect an array of connections

local connections = {}

for _, button in buttons do
	table.insert(connections, button.Activated:Connect(function() --[[ ... ]] end))
end

-- ... later, if we want to clean up all the connections

Teardown.teardown(connections)

join

Creates a single Teardown object from all the given Teardown objects.

local interface: Instance = createInterfaceInstance()
local connections = connectEvents(interface)

local function customCleanup()
	-- do some custom clean up logic here
end

-- `join` will group all these Teardown objects into a single one
local joined = Teardown.join(connections, interface, customCleanup)

-- then, when we're ready we can clean connections, interface and
-- customCleanup at the same time with
Teardown.teardown(joined)

fn

Creates a function that will teardown all the given Teardown objects.

local cleanUp = Teardown.fn(connections, thread)

-- ...

cleanUp() -- teardown all the previously passed objects

This function can be useful with React useEffect hooks:

useEffect(function()
	return Teardown.fn(
		task.spawn(function()
			-- ... do something
		end)
	)
end)