overleaf/README.md

An open-source online real-time collaborative LaTeX editor.

Key Features • Wiki • Server Pro • Contributing • Mailing List • Authors • License

Figure 1: A screenshot of Overleaf Server Pro's comments and tracked changes features.

Key Features

Overleaf is an open-source online real-time collaborative LaTeX editor. We run a hosted version at www.overleaf.com, but you can also run your own local version, and contribute to the development of Overleaf.

If you want help installing and maintaining Overleaf in your lab or workplace, we offer an officially supported version called Overleaf Server Pro. It also comes with extra security and admin features. Click here to find out more!

Keeping up to date

Sign up to the mailing list to get updates on Overleaf Releases and development

Installation

We have detailed installation instructions in our wiki:

• Overleaf Quick Start Guide

Upgrading

If you are upgrading from a previous version of Overleaf, please see the Release Notes section on the Wiki for all of the versions between your current version and the version you are upgrading to.

Other repositories

This repository does not contain any code. It acts a wrapper and toolkit for managing the many different Overleaf services. These each run as their own Node.js process and have their own GitHub repository.

Service	Description
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.
docstore	An API for performing CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on text files stored in Overleaf.
real-time	The websocket process clients connect to.
filestore	An API for performing CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on binary files (like images) stored in Overleaf.
track-changes	An API for compressing and storing the updates applied to a document, and then rendering a diff of the changes between any two time points.
chat	The backend API for storing and fetching chat messages.
spelling	An API for running server-side spelling checking on Overleaf documents.

Overleaf Docker Image

This repo contains two dockerfiles, Dockerfile-base, which builds the sharelatex/sharelatex-base image, and Dockerfile which builds the sharelatex/sharelatex (or "community") image.

The Base image generally contains the basic dependencies like wget and aspell, plus texlive. We split this out because it's a pretty heavy set of dependencies, and it's nice to not have to rebuild all of that every time.

The sharelatex/sharelatex image extends the base image and adds the actual Overleaf code and services.

Use make build-base and make build-community from server-ce/ to build these images.

We use the Phusion base-image (which is extended by our base image) to provide us with a VM-like container in which to run the Overleaf services. Baseimage uses the runit service manager to manage services, and we add our init-scripts from the server-ce/runit folder.

Contributing

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

Authors

The Overleaf Team

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) Overleaf, 2014-2019.