ShareLaTeX

ShareLaTeX is an open-source online real-time collaborative LaTeX editor. We run a hosted version at http://www.sharelatex.com, but you can also run your own local version, and contribute to the development of ShareLaTeX.

If you want help installing and maintaining ShareLaTeX at your university or workplace, we offer an officially supported version called ShareLaTeX Server Pro. It also comes with extra security and admin features. Click here to find out more!

Installation

We have detailed installation instructions in our wiki:

• Installing ShareLaTeX in Production
• Setting up a ShareLaTeX Development Environment

If you have any problems, have a look at our page of Frequent Problems and Questions.

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 2.6.12 or later) and MongoDB running on their standard ports.
• TeXLive 2013 or later with the latexmk program installed.

ShareLaTeX needs a minimum of 2gb of memory, it is likely to be more than that though depending on usage.

Other repositories

This repository does not contain any code. It acts a wrapper and toolkit for managing the many different ShareLaTeX services. These each run as their own Node.js process and have their own Github repository. These are all downloaded and set up when 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.

docstore

An API for performing CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on text files stored in ShareLaTeX.

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.

chat

The backend API for storing and fetching chat messages.

tags

The backend API for managing project tags (folders).

spelling

An API for running server-side spelling checking on ShareLaTeX documents.

Dropbox

Please note that certain features like Dropbox integration are not functional in the open source code base yet, despite appearing in the user interface. We're working on this, sorry!

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

• Henry Oswald
• James Allen

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.

Copyright (c) ShareLaTeX, 2014.