CI for LaTex

How to use bitbucket pipelines to generate LaTex documents

Why do this? It’s a handy way to have LaTex documents on the go and collaboration.

Docker container

The typical way of installing LaTex is texlive and one would normally install the full version. Whilst, this is great it is pretty big. So I have created a container with a basic LaTex installation: https://hub.docker.com/r/wrdeman/docker-min-tex This may or may not meet your requirements.

FROM ubuntu:bionic
ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive

RUN apt-get update -q \
    && apt-get install --no-install-recommends -qy \ 
    libfontconfig1 \
    texlive-base \
    texlive-extra-utils \
    texlive-generic-recommended \
    texlive-fonts-recommended \
    texlive-font-utils \
    texlive-latex-base \
    texlive-latex-recommended \
    texlive-latex-extra \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

ENV HOME /data
WORKDIR /data
VOLUME ["/data"]

Using the image on docker hub, we create a pdf document as:

docker run --rm -i --net=none -v "$PWD":/data wrdeman/docker-min-tex pdflatex a-document.tex

So far so good …

Bitbucket pipeline

We can use bitbucket’s pipeline to build our document and save the output as an downloadable file. First we need to create git repo with a latex file and bitbucket-pipelines.yml.

The pipeline needs to

• run our previous docker command
• mark the output file as an artifact in the step
• send the output file to the download API endpoint

as the following yml

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        services:
          - docker
        script: 
          - docker run --rm -i --net=none -v "$PWD":/data wrdeman/docker-min-tex pdflatex a-document.tex
        artifacts:
          - a-document.pdf
    - step:
        script:   
          - curl -X POST --user "${BB_STRING}" "https://api.bitbucket.org/2.0/repositories/${BITBUCKET_USERNAME}/${BITBUCKET_REPO_SLUG}/downloads" --form files=@"a-document.pdf" 

We need to set some variables, in the repo’s settings->reposity variables. These are:

• BB_STRING is the “USERNAME:APP_PASSWORD”
• BITBUCKET_USERNAME
• BITBUCKET_REPO_SLUG

The APP_PASSWORD can be create in you bitbucket account settings->App passwords.

Now when you commit the repo the pipeline will run and a document will appear in the repo’s download directory.