Write LaTeX, push to git, let Travis automatically build your file and release a pdf automatically to GitHub releases when the commit was tagged.

This repository contains an overview of the methods you could use to build your LaTeX on a remote server (continuous integration server). You want that because then every time you push it will automatically check if you pushed valid LaTeX. If you are looking for instructions to build LaTeX locally, look here. If you are looking for instructions to build LaTeX on GitLab CI, have a look below.

Table of Contents

• Choose your build method
  • Tectonic
  • 1. Docker image with Tectonic
  • 2. Miniconda with Tectonic
  • 3. Docker image with TeX Live
  • 4. TeX Live with pdflatex/lualatex/latexmk/xelatex/texliveonfly/etc
  • 5. TeX Live and pdflatex via tinytex with R.
• Instructions for each build method
  • Instructions for building with Docker and Tectonic
  • Instructions for building with Miniconda and Tectonic
    • Separate instructions for adding biber to your Miniconda and Tectonic setup
  • Instructions for building with TeX Live from a Docker image
    • Using a docker image with texlive and texliveonfly
  • Instructions for building with pdflatex/lualatex/latexmk/xelatex/texliveonfly/etc and TeX Live
  • Instructions for building with TeX Live and pdflatex via tinytex with R
  • To automatically deploy pdfs to GitHub release
    • First time setup
    • For every new project
  • Tips
  • Troubleshooting
  • Notes
• Contributing
• GitLab CI

Thanks to Dan Foreman-Mackey for writing about Tectonic. The first two methods do not use the pdflatex engine to compile, but Tectonic which is a fork of XeTeX (thanks to ShreevatsaR for pointing this out). Please leave a comment to vote for adding documentation about using Tectonic at tectonic-typesetting/tectonic#373

Important note: there have been recurring problems with the persistent urls from which the packages are downloaded, if you encounter this (e.g. 'PURL setup link has expired SSL certificate' or 'couldn't probe ...') then you can try the workaround described at tectonic-typesetting/tectonic#131 (comment)

• automatically loops TeX and BibTeX as needed, and only as much as needed
• automatically downloads LaTeX packages which are needed
• can generate an index
• fastest build time
• also can use biber

• Tectonic does not support the -shell-escape flag at the moment (see tectonic/#38), which is required for example by the minted package. The pdflatex way (below) has been tested to work with the minted package.

We will quickly compare two methods to use Tectonic, after that we will discuss more conventional methods which can compile with pfdlatex, lualatex etc.

Note that since May 2018 Travis moved open source to travis-ci.com (instead of travis-ci.org). Travis is also now available as GitHub App in the Marketplace, but old repositories (like this one) are still on travis-ci.org.

Thanks to Norbert Pozar (@rekka) for providing the original Docker image. Manuel (@WtfJoke) extended it by integrating biber. Docker provides the ability to download a pre-installed Tectonic and then run it on your LaTeX files.

• Tectonic is ready really fast, because downloading the image is all it takes
• The Docker image is really small, around 75MB
• Works with bibtex automatically
• Can automatically deploy pdfs
• Works with biber

• Slower than the other methods because all packages have to be reinstalled every time

Build time example file: two minutes

Want this? Instructions below.

• It is also fast because tectonic and packages are cached
• Can automatically deploy pdfs
• Can work with Biber, thanks to Malcolm Ramsay who made it work.

• Cache is bigger, although still small enough to not really be a disadvantage

Build time example file: 1-2 minutes

Want this? Instructions below.

This method downloads a docker image which contains a small TeX Live installation. Thanks to Andreas Strauman for figuring this out, give his tex.stackexchange.com answer an upvote if you like it! At the moment it uses latexmk to compile pdfs which is configured to run pdflatex by default, but it should be easy to configure it for other tex engines.

• Very clean build files, only a very short .travis.yml file is needed.
• You can specify options in your .travis.yml, for example which files to build and which packages to install.
• You can also provide extra latexmk flags, for example -dvi to generate a dvi file.

• Packages are (not yet) cached, so the build time is long
• You still need to specify which packages you require to be installed (unless you use the texliveonfly image, see the instructions below)

Build time example file: 4 minutes (9 minutes when using texliveonfly)

Want this? Instructions below.

Thanks to Joseph Wright who pointed out that they use something based on this setup for LaTeX3 development.

• Uses any compiler you want, this can be useful for example if you need pdflatex for some cases like the minted package.
• Fast, because of caching
• Almost all required packages are downloaded automatically
• Tested to work with the minted package
• Tested to work with custom fonts

• You need to copy extra build files to each repository, besides the .travis.yml.

Build time example file: 1-2 minutes

Want this? Instructions below.

Thanks to Hugh for pointing out this option.

• Uses pdflatex
• Automatically installs packages needed
• Works with Biber

• You need to specify how much times to compile
• Build time is very long

Build time example file: 5-8 minutes

Want this? Instructions below.

• Install the Travis GitHub App by going to the Marketplace, scroll down, select Open Source (also when you want to use private repos) and select 'Install it for free', then 'Complete order and begin installation'.
• Now you should be in Personal settings | Applications | Travis CI | Configure and you can allow access to repositories, either select repos or all repos.
• Copy 1-tectonic-docker/.travis.yml and specify the right tex file in the line with docker run. If your tex file is not in the src/ folder, you also need to change the path in that line after $TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR.
• If you want to compile multiple files, you can replace tectonic main.tex by tectonic main.tex; tectonic main2.tex.
• If you want to use biber, you can use tectonic --keep-intermediates --reruns 0 main.tex; biber main; tectonic main.tex
• Commit and push, you can view your repositories at travis-ci.com.
• For deploying to GitHub releases, see the notes below.
• Have a look at the Tips.
• If your build doesn't start, see Troubleshooting.

• Install the Travis GitHub App by going to the Marketplace, scroll down, select Open Source (also when you want to use private repos) and select 'Install it for free', then 'Complete order and begin installation'.
• Now you should be in Personal settings | Applications | Travis CI | Configure and you can allow access to repositories, either select repos or all repos.
• Copy 2-tectonic-miniconda/.travis.yml and specify the right tex file in the script section in .travis.yml. You can uncomment the makeindex line and the extra tectonic call if you want to use an index.
• Commit and push, you can view your repositories at travis-ci.com.
• For deploying to GitHub releases, see the notes below.
• Have a look at the Tips.
• If your build doesn't start, see Troubleshooting.
• If you get the error This means that your biber (2.xx) and biblatex (3.yy) versions are incompatible that means that Tectonic has a different biblatex version than the biber version specified in the config. To fix this, open your .travis.yml and change biber==2.xx to biber==2.yy, for example if biblatex 3.11 is present then you need to install biber 2.11. This trick works for any recent version of biblatex, as can be seen in the biber docs.

These changes have already been added to the .travis.yml, but to be clear here are the separate instructions if you already have Miniconda and Tectonic running:

• Install the correct biber version (see above) either from sourceforge, or with conda conda install -c malramsay biber==2.xx
• Run tectonic once to create intermediate files, followed by biber, and finally complete compilation of the document with tectonic.

tectonic --keep-intermediates --reruns 0 ./main.tex
biber main
tectonic ./main.tex

• Following this project, Malcolm Ramsay has a great blog post documenting this use case in a very complete way.

• Install the Travis GitHub App by going to the Marketplace, scroll down, select Open Source (also when you want to use private repos) and select 'Install it for free', then 'Complete order and begin installation'.
• Now you should be in Personal settings | Applications | Travis CI | Configure and you can allow access to repositories, either select repos or all repos.
• Copy 3-texlive-docker/.travis.yml and specify which tex files you want to build in the build-pattern option.
• Add all the required LaTeX packages to the packages option, by checking at https://www.ctan.org/pkg/some-package to see in which TeX Live package it is contained (which may be different than the LaTeX package name). Alternatively, use the texliveonfly images as below.
• Commit and push, you can view your repositories at travis-ci.com.
• For deploying to GitHub releases, see the notes below.
• Have a look at the Tips.
• If your build doesn't start, see Troubleshooting.

You can also use a docker image which uses texliveonfly, it is based on the above-mentioned docker image. It is somewhat experimental in the sense that sometimes texliveonfly seems to hang (for longer than 10 mins), although usually it seems to work fine. Texliveonfly calls pdflatex by default, but you can change this and more options in arguments. Some documentation can be found at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/463842/98850 which also includes a little list of packages which texliveonfly does not download.

The only change in the instructions is that you use the docker image as specified in texlive-docker-texliveonfly/.travis.yml, and that you don't need to specify packages manually in that file.

If for some reason you prefer the pdflatex (or any other) engine with the TeX Live distribution, read on. This is based on the LaTeX3 build file.

This method installs an almost minimal TeX Live installation on Travis, and compiles with pdflatex. This repo contains:

• The TeX Live install script texlive_install.sh including profile texlive/texlive.profile (specifies for example the TeX Live scheme)
• A Travis configuration file
• Demonstration LaTeX files in src/

• Install the Travis GitHub App by going to the Marketplace, scroll down, select Open Source (also when you want to use private repos) and select 'Install it for free', then 'Complete order and begin installation'.

• Now you should be in Personal settings | Applications | Travis CI | Configure and you can allow access to repositories, either select repos or all repos.

• Copy the files in the folder 4-texlive to your repo, so .travis.yml and the texlive/ folder.

• Specify the right tex file in the .travis.yml under the script section. Possibly you also need to change the folder in before_script if not using src/.

• Commit and push, you can view your repositories at travis-ci.com. (Thanks to @jason-neal for improving this)

• For deploying to GitHub releases, see the notes below.

• If the build fails because some package is missing you have to add it manually in texlive_packages. This configuration uses the texliveonfly package which tries to download missing packages but sometimes the error message is non-standard and that fails.

  In that case, put the package you want to install in texlive/texlive_packages, by checking at https://www.ctan.org/pkg/some-package to see in which TeX Live package it is contained (which may be different than the LaTeX package name). If you find a package which is not automatically downloaded, it would be great if you could let us know by submitting an issue.

  You can find required LaTeX packages of your document (say main.tex) by installing the snapshot package and then running pdflatex -draftmode -interaction=batchmode "\RequirePackage{snapshot}\input{main}" (thanks to Pablo Gonzalez for finding this). This will produce a file snapshot.dep with dependencies. Note this requires that you have all required packages installed on your system.

• If you use custom fonts, read on.

• Tip from gvacaliuc: In order to maintain the install scripts in a central repo and link to them, you could also just copy .travis.yml and replace

install:
 - source ./texlive/texlive_install.sh

with

install:
  - mkdir ./texlive/
  - 4-texlive
  - 4-texlive
  - 4-texlive
  - source ./texlive/texlive_install.sh

• Preferably you fork this repo so you can maintain your own build files with the right packages.

Note that sometimes tlmgr selects a broken mirror to download TeX Live from, so you get an error like Output was gpg: verify signatures failed: eof. Restarting the build will probably fix this, it will auto-select a different mirror. (Thanks to @jason-neal for testing this.)

You can also read a nice blog post by Jeremy Grifski (@jrg94) about using the setup from this repo including the minted package at https://therenegadecoder.com/code/how-to-build-latex-with-travis-ci-and-minted/

In order to enable Travis to use custom fonts, i.e. those fonts not provided by Ubuntu or TeX Live packages, it is probably easiest to push them with git. An example is in this repo, with the file src/fonts.tex and the fonts in src/fonts. You can do the following to use them on Travis:

• Make sure you have the fonts pushed to you GitHub repository
• Make sure that your texlive_packages file contains the packages collection-fontsrecommended and luaotfload
• If you are starting from scratch, you can adapt 4-texlive/fonts-travis-yml/.travis.yml. If you want to change your current .travis.yml, do the following:
  • In the .travis.yml, uncomment the following lines (make sure to change src/fonts to your own path if it is different)

  before_install:
    - mkdir $HOME/.fonts
    - cp -a $TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR/src/fonts/. $HOME/.fonts/
    - fc-cache -f -v

  • Make sure to compile with lualatex or xelatex, for example if you previously had texliveonfly main.tex and latexmk -pdf main.tex in your .travis.yml, then change them to texliveonfly main.tex --compiler=lualatex and latexmk -pdflua main.tex.

• • Install the Travis GitHub App by going to the Marketplace, scroll down, select Open Source (also when you want to use private repos) and select 'Install it for free', then 'Complete order and begin installation'.
  • Now you should be in Personal settings | Applications | Travis CI | Configure and you can allow access to repositories, either select repos or all repos.
• Copy the files in the folder 5-tinytex to your repo, so .travis.yml and install_texlive.R.
• Specify the right tex file in .travis.yml.
• Commit and push, you can view your repositories at travis-ci.com.
• For deploying to GitHub releases, see the notes below.
• Have a look at the Tips.
• If your build doesn't start, see Troubleshooting.

We will add a configuration to the .travis.yml such that a pdf will be automatically uploaded to GitHub releases when you tag a commit, also see the Travis documentation.

• We will generate a GitHub OAuth key so Travis can push to your releases, with the important difference (compared to just gettting it via GitHub settings) that it's encryped so you can push it safely.
• (Windows) Download ruby and at at end of the installation make sure to install MSYS including development kit.
• Run gem install travis --no-rdoc --no-ri to install the Travis Command-line Tool.

• Go to the directory of your repository, open the command prompt (Windows: SHIFT+F10 W ENTER) and run travis setup releases --pro. Specify your GitHub credentials, and fill in anything for File to Upload.
• Replace everything below your encryped api key with (changing the path to your pdf file, probably the same folder as your tex file is in)

  file: 
  - ./src/nameofmytexfile.pdf
  - ./otherfile.pdf
  skip_cleanup: true
  on:
    tags: true
    branch: master

• Commit and push.
• If you are ready to release, just tag and push.

• You can tell Travis to skip the build for a certain commit by prefixing the commit message with [ci skip].
• If you want the badge in your readme, just copy the code below to your readme and change the links.

Markdown:

[![Build Status](https://api.travis-ci.com/username/reponame.svg)](https://travis-ci.com/username/reponame)

reStructuredText:

.. image:: https://travis-ci.com/username/reponame.svg?branch=master
    :target: https://travis-ci.com/username/reponame
    :alt: Build Status

• You may want to edit settings on Travis to not build both on pull request and branch updates, and cancel running jobs if new ones are pushed.

• When trying to fix your .travis.yml, it may be helpful to trigger custom builds instead of creating a new commit every time, as explained in https://blog.travis-ci.com/2017-08-24-trigger-custom-build

• If your build doesn't start you should first look at Travis (so on https://travis-ci.com/username/reponame) under More Options | Requests, it might for example be that the .travis.yml could not be parsed, for example because your indentation is wrong. You can also manually trigger a build there.

• If you do not understand why your build is failing, it may help to run the relevant commands on a local Ubuntu system, if you have one.

• There are much more CI services than just Travis, for example CircleCI or SemaphoreCI and much more. If you manage to use one of them, it would be great if you could report back!

I also put some of these instructions on the TeX Stackexchange.

Some original thoughts from harshjv's blog, and thanks to jackolney for all his attempts to put it into practice. Also see harshjv's original blog post.

If you want to add/update a method to build LaTeX, look in the contributing guidelines.

At the moment, only the Texlive method explained above was tested in GitLab for this repo. The instructions are similar but with of course a different configuration file, which can be found in gitlab/texlive for now. This still has to be moved to GitLab. The only disadvantage is that the caching of TeX Live does not work, because it is not installed in the project, but artifacts have to be in the project directory for GitLab. The build time for the example file is around four minutes.

A more extensive overview of configurations for GitLab CI will come in the future, either in this or an other repo. Please contribute if you can help with this! Some links to get started:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/459484/compiling-latex-files-automatically-with-gitlab-ci

https://www.vipinajayakumar.com/continuous-integration-of-latex-projects-with-gitlab-pages.html

https://sayantangkhan.github.io/latex-gitlab-ci.html

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/412740/gitlab-ci-runner-with-relative-paths-in-main-tex

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/437553/gitlab-ci-using-miktex-docker-image