ShareLaTeX Docker Image

Please read this entire file before installing ShareLaTeX via Docker. It's only short but contains some important information.

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

$ docker run -d \
  -v ~/sharelatex_data:/var/lib/sharelatex \
  -p 5000:80 \
  --name=sharelatex \
  sharelatex/sharelatex

This will download the ShareLaTeX image and start it running in the background on port 5000. You should be able to access it at http://localhost:5000/.

To stop ShareLaTeX:

docker stop sharelatex

and to start it again:

docker start sharelatex

If you want to permanently remove ShareLaTeX from your docker containers:

docker rm sharelatex

Mongo and Redis

ShareLaTeX depends on MongoDB (must be 2.4 or later), and Redis (must be version 2.6.12 or later). These should be running on the host system.

Note that Docker containers each come with their own network stack, and Mongo and Redis often listen by default on 127.0.0.1 which is not accessible on the host from inside the Docker container. Instead, you should configure Mongo and Redis to also listen on 172.17.42.1 (or whatever ip iddress the docker0 interface has on your host). This can be done in /etc/mongod.conf and /etc/redis/redis.conf.

# /etc/mongod.conf
...
bind_ip = 172.17.42.1
...

# /etc/redis/redis.conf
...
bind 172.17.42.1
...

By default the ShareLaTeX Docker container looks for these running on the host machine at port 27017 (for Mongo) and port 6379 (for Redis). These are the defaults ports for both databases so you shouldn't need to change them.

If you want to point ShareLaTeX at a database in a different location, you can configure the container with environment variables. See the Configuration Options section below.

Note that localhost in the container refers only to the container, so if you want to access services on the host machine then you should use dockerhost. dockerhost refers to the the 172.17.42.1 ip address mentioned above. For example:

$ docker run -d \
  -v ~/sharelatex_data:/var/lib/sharelatex \
  -p 5000:80 \
  --name=sharelatex \
  --env SHARELATEX_MONGO_URL=mongodb://dockerhost/sharelatex \
  sharelatex/sharelatex

Storing Data

The -v ~/sharelatex_data:/var/lib/sharelatex option in the run command tells Docker to make the host directory ~/sharelatex_data available inside the container for ShareLaTeX to store data files in. This means that you can back up and access these files manually outside of the ShareLaTeX container. If you would like to store ShareLaTeX data in a different location, such as /home/james/my_data, just change this parameter:

$ docker run -d \
  -v /home/james/my_data:/var/lib/sharelatex \
  -p 80 \
  --name=sharelatex \
  sharelatex/sharelatex

Do not change the second part of this parameter (after the :).

This is only where ShareLaTeX stores on-disk data. Other data is also stored in Mongo and Redis.

Backups

To backup the ShareLaTeX data, you need to backup the directory you have attached to the container, as above. You also need to backup the Mongo and Redis databases.

Running on a different port

The container listens on port 80 by default so you should be able to access ShareLaTeX at http://localhost/. If you would like to run ShareLaTeX on a different port (perhaps you have another service running on port 80, or want to put a proxy in front of ShareLaTeX), then you can forward port 80 from the Docker container to any other port with the -p <PORT>:80 option. For example, to have ShareLaTeX listen on port 5000:

$ docker run -d \
  -v ~/sharelatex_data:/var/lib/sharelatex \
  -p 5000:80 \
  --name=sharelatex \
  --env SHARELATEX_SITE_URL=http://localhost:5000 \
  sharelatex/sharelatex

(Note that you also have to update the SHARELATEX_SITE_URL parameter so that ShareLaTeX knows where to refer to scripts and links that need loading.)

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 \
  -p 5000:80 \
  --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. Only use this if your ShareLaTeX instance is running behind a reverse proxy with SSL configured.

Upgrading from older versions

Please make sure to back up all Mongo, Redis and on-disk data before upgrading.

Stop and remove the currently running ShareLaTeX container:

$ docker stop sharelatex
$ docker rm sharelatex

Start a new container with the updated version of ShareLaTeX (to upgrade to version 1.4.0 for example):

$ docker run -d -v ~/sharelatex_data:/var/lib/sharelatex --name=sharelatex sharelatex/sharelatex:1.4.0