Building Overleaf projects locally

For a while I’ve wanted to be able to build my Overleaf projects locally so that I can work on them when the internet is poor. Well I finally figured out to how to do it!

Step 1: Install Latex (via TexLive)

Instructions here, it’s worth getting the version with all the packages because you’ll likely need a bunch and they’re a pain to install one by one.

Make sure you have the tex live package manager tlmgr which I’m pretty sure is installed with the latex.

Step 2: Install latexmk and texliveonfly

Update tlmgr, depending on how it’s installed tlmgr may or may not need root permissions, mine does.

  sudo tlmgr update --self #update tlmgr because it always complains

Overleaf uses latexmk to manage compilation so you need that. And if you’re like me and you only installed the light version of texlive above then you’ll likely need a bunch of extra packages for your target overlead project, so install texliveonfly which we’ll use later to autoinstall the packages.

sudo tlmgr install latexmk texliveonfly

Step 3: Clone your Overleaf project

You can either clone your overleaf project directly with

git clone $overleaf_project_link

or create a linked github repo from the settings tab of Overleaf and clone that.

Install packages

Now cd into your newly cloned repo and use texliveonfly to install the packages that your project depends on by running sudo texliveonfly on your main tex file.

sudo texliveonfly main.tex 

Compilation

The actual compilation is done with latexmk:

latexmk -pdf -shell-escape main.tex

I had to add the -shell-escape option because I was using a package (latexmarkdown) that requires running external commands.