5.2 KiB
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.
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.
Manually
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
This will create a config file in config/settings.development.coffee. You should open
this now and configure your AWS S3 credentials, and other custom settings.
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.
With Vagrant
There is a Vagrant and Ansible backed VM installation script for ShareLaTeX, maintained by @palkan, available here: https://github.com/palkan/sharelatex-vagrant-ansible
Dependencies
ShareLaTeX should run on OS X and Linux. You need:
- Node.js 0.10 or greater. We recommend that you use nvm to install it.
- The grunt command line tools (Run
npm install -g grunt-clito install them) - A local instance of Redis (version 2.6 or later) and MongoDB running on their standard ports.
- TeXLive 2013 or later with the
latexmkprogram installed.
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
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.