Motivation
When I first started using TeX, my main OS was Arch Linux. This was fine until I switched to NixOS a couple years ago — I found that NixOS’s packaging of TexLive was not as current as Arch Linux.
This is still the case today.
As much as I love using NixOS, creating a Nix package of a very large project like TexLive is no joke.
Enter Docker
Containerization makes sense for small, do-one-thing-well services like webservers and such, but it makes even more sense for big, complicated collections of packages like TexLive. There are hundreds (thousands?) of components in TexLive: individual TeX packages, fonts, typesetting engines, etc. Thankfully, Arch Linux maintainers do a great of keeping up with upstream packages, and TexLive is no exception!
I’ve created a new Github project (simply called texlive-docker) to house the Dockerfiles I use to create TexLive images — all built on top of Arch Linux as the base image.
The project uses TravisCI to upload images to Docker Hub.
Be sure to have a look at the README for suggestions on usage.
Closing Thoughts
If you have any suggestions for improvement (please bear in mind that we want to keep the images as simple as possible), please let me know in the Github issue tracker.
Happy TeX-ing!
