ShareLaTeX

ShareLaTeX is now open source! ShareLaTeX is an online real-time collaborative LaTeX editor, and you can now run your own local version where you can host, edit, collaborate in real-time, and compile your LaTeX documents. We’re still 100% focused on running the hosted version at http://www.sharelatex.com, but we want to be more flexible in how you can use ShareLaTeX, and give something back to our wonderful community.

Read more on our blog

Installation

ShareLaTeX uses a service oriented architecture (SOA) where we have lots of small APIs that talk to each other over HTTP and Redis pub-sub channels. This repository pulls together all of the different services and allows you to set up and run them quickly.

First, check out a local copy of this repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex.git
$ cd sharelatex

Next install all the node modules and ShareLaTeX services:

$ npm install
$ grunt install

Now check that your system is set up correctly to run ShareLaTeX (checks that you have the required dependencies installed.) Watch out for any failures.

$ grunt check --force

When that has finished, run ShareLaTeX with

$ grunt run

ShareLaTeX should now be running at http://localhost:3000.

Dependencies

ShareLaTeX should run on OS X and Linux. You need:

• Node.js 0.10 or greater

• The grunt command line tools (Run npm install -g grunt-cli to install them)

• A local instance of Redis (version 2.6 or later) and MongoDB running on their standard ports.

• An up to date version of TeXLive, with the latexmk program installed. You need latexmk from TeXLive 2013 (or the later). If you're on an older version, or aren't sure, then the following commands will install the latest version locally:

  $ mkdir ~/bin 
  $ curl http://mirror.physik-pool.tu-berlin.de/tex-archive/support/latexmk/latexmk.pl > ~/bin/latexmk
  $ chmod a+x ~/bin/latexmk
  $ export PATH=~/bin:$PATH
  

Config

ShareLaTeX should mostly run out of the box, although it uses Amazon S3 for storing binary files like images. You will need to configure ShareLaTeX to use your own S3 access key which can be done by editing the file at config/settings.development.coffee

A local settings file can be specified by setting the SHARELATEX_CONFIG environment variable to point to your own settings file. E.g.

$ export SHARELATEX_CONFIG=/home/james/config/settings.development.coffee

Other repositories

ShareLaTeX consists of many separate services, each with their own Node.js process and source code repository. These are all downloaded and set upwhen you run grunt install

The different services are:

web

The front facing web server that serves all the HTML pages, CSS and JavaScript to the client. Also contains a lot of logic around creating and editing projects, and account management.

document-updater

Processes updates that come in from the editor when users modify documents. Ensures that the updates are applied in the right order, and that only one operation is modifying the document at a time. Also caches the documents in redis for very fast but persistent modifications.

CLSI

The Common LaTeX Service Interface (CLSI) which provides an API for compiling LaTeX documents.

filestore

An API for performing CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on binary files (like images) stored in ShareLaTeX.

Contributing

Please see the CONTRIBUTING file for information on contributing to the development of ShareLaTeX. See our wiki for information on setting up a development environment and how to recompile and run ShareLaTeX after modifications.

Authors

• Henry Oswald
• James Allen

License

The code in this repository is released under the GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE, version 3. A copy can be found in the LICENSE file.

Copyright (c) ShareLaTeX, 2014.