luasec seems to be on luarocks, wouldn't that makes sense to move it to the automated packages instead ?

luaossl too for what it's worth xD . If you are willing to go through the process and have any trouble/question let me know.

Feel free to try.

I tried generating these, but they wouldn't build, even if I overrode them to depend on openssl. (I don't know what's wrong.)

sorry completely missed this. Ok will try.

The generated expression didn't contain openssl reference (not surprising), so I added it to buildInputs via the usual overrides, but they still couldn't find headers from the package. I was probably doing something wrong; in any case I chose a quicker solution for now.

if you feel confident enough to merge it, let's do it, I will investiage the issue later.
luarocks makes some assumptions on how paths are searched, so for instance if it finds X/include, it will look for the lib in X/lib and ignore Y/lib (or something along these lines IIRC) which is why sometimes it's necessary to specify manually the folders like

    extraConfig = ''
      variables = {
        LIBUUID_INCDIR="${pkgs.lib.getDev pkgs.libuuid}/include";
        LIBUUID_LIBDIR="${pkgs.lib.getLib pkgs.libuuid}/lib";
      }
    '';

upstream didn't seem too excited about "fixing" this. so maybe I could do it in our fork.

It would be best to support and prefer pkg-config to search for dependencies.

I can only agree luarocks/luarocks#514