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.

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

With Docker

An automatic docker-based installer is available. It depends on docker and will build a production environment for running ShareLaTeX on any supported platform.

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-cli to 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 latexmk program installed.

Config

ShareLaTeX should run out of the box, but if you want to adjust any settings you can do so by editing the config/settings.development.coffee file. Available options are explained inline.

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.

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. Still in development and not hooked into the UI yet.

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.

ssahai/sharelatex