LaTeX CI Build Environment

Compiling TeX documents in a CI environment can be tricky if you do not have root access or do not want to wait the long while it takes for a LaTeX installation live TeX Live to install. Using docker we can both describe the build configuration as code and make sure to reliable reproduce build result locally.

Create a Dockerfile in you LaTeX projects root. If you do not use make to build you can replace it with your own build command. The only important thing is that it creates the output PDF in a separate directory. I use the directory name pdf.

FROM emijoh/texlive

COPY / /

RUN make

The image emijoh/texlive is auto built by docker hub from this GitHub repository.

Then build the Dockerfile, create the container, and copy out the build directory.

#!/bin/bash
docker build . -t cv
CID=$(docker create cv)
docker cp ${CID}:/pdf .
docker rm ${CID}

Now the resulting pdf will be available in the project root in a folder pdf.