ShareLaTeX Docker Image

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND THESE INSTRUCTIONS DO NOT WORK YET!

The recommended way to install and run ShareLaTeX Community Edition is via Docker:

$ docker run -d -v /sharelatex-data:/var/lib/sharelatex --net=host --name=sharelatex sharelatex/sharelatex

This will download the ShareLaTeX image and start it running in the background.

Which port does it listen on?.

Mongo and Redis

The --net=host option to docker will allow the ShareLaTeX container to access ports on the local system. By default it looks for an instance of MongoDB (must be version 2.4 or later) running on port 27017, and Redis (must be version 2.6.12 or later) running on port 6379. These are the default ports for a standard installation of MongoDB and Redis.

Persisting and backing up data

The -v /sharelatex-data:/var/lib/sharelatex option in the run command tells Docker to mount the local directory /sharelatex-data in the container at /var/lib/sharelatex. This is where ShareLaTeX will store user uploaded files, and allows you to make external backups of these files, as well as persist them between updates to the ShareLaTeX image.

LaTeX environment

To save bandwidth, the ShareLaTeX image only comes with a minimal install of TeXLive. To upgrade to a complete TeXLive installation, run the following command:

$ docker exec sharelatex tlmgr install scheme-full

Or you can install packages manually as you need by replacing scheme-full by the package name

Configuration Options

You can pass configuration options to ShareLaTeX as environment variables:

$ docker run -d \
	-v /sharelatex-data:/var/lib/sharelatex \
	--net=host \
	--name=sharelatex \
	--env SHARELATEX_MONGO_URL=mongodb://my.mongo.host/sharelatex \
	sharelatex/sharelatex

The available configuration parameters are:

• SHARELATEX_SITE_URL: Where your instance of ShareLaTeX is publically available. This is used in public links, and when connecting over websockets, so much be configured correctly!
• SHARELATEX_MONGO_URL: The URL of the Mongo database to use
• SHARELATEX_REDIS_HOST: The host name of the Redis instance to use
• SHARELATEX_REDIS_PORT: The port of the Redis instance to use
• SHARELATEX_REDIS_PASS: The password to use when connecting to Redis (if applicable)
• SHARELATEX_SECURE_COOKIE: Set this to something non-zero to use a secure cookie. This requires that your ShareLaTeX instance is running behind SSL.

Upgrading from older versions

TODO: Just stop container, remove 'sharelatex' tag, and run with the new version.