TeX Live docker image

This repository provides dockerfiles for TeX Live repositories (full installation with all packages but without documentation). It also provides the necessary tooling to execute common helper tools (e.g. Java for arara, Perl for Biber and Xindy, Python for Pygments).

Please note that we only provide selected historical releases and one image corresponding to the latest release of TeX Live (tagged latest).

To use one of these images in your projects, simply lookup the name of the image in our registry and use

FROM registry.gitlab.com/islandoftex/images/texlive:latest

or any other tag.

If you want to pull these images from Docker Hub, simply use

FROM texlive/texlive:latest

or any other tag.

For some tutorials on using these images within a Docker workflow, have a look at the posts listed on our wiki page.

These images are provided by the Island of TeX. Please use the images' repo to report issues or feature request. We are not active on the TeX Live mailing list.

Flavors we provide

For every release X (e.g. latest) we are providing the following flavors:

• X: A "minimal" TeX Live installation without documentation and source files. However, all tools mentioned above will work without problems.
• X-doc: X with documentation files.
• X-src: X with source files.
• X-doc-src: X with documentation and source files.

If in doubt, choose X and only pull the larger images if you have to. Especially documentation files do add a significant payload.

The latest release

Our continuous integration is scheduled to rebuild all Docker images weekly. Hence, pulling the latest image will provide you with an at most one week old snapshot of TeX Live including all packages. You can manually update within the container by running tlmgr update --self --all.

Each of the weekly builds is tagged with TL{RELEASE}-{YEAR}-{MONTH}-{DAY} apart from being latest for one week. If you want to have reproducible builds or happen to find a regression in a later image you can still revert to a date that worked, e.g. TL2022-2022-06-05.

In releases prior to TL2021, we used TL{RELEASE}-{YEAR}-{MONTH}-{DAY}-{HOUR}-{MINUTE} which should be considered when referring to older images by date.

latest images are also available for different TeX Live schemes. The following schemes are built: minimal, basic, small, medium, and full. For all these, you may use them with doc tree, src tree, or both, or none like you would a regular latest image. Example: latest-small-doc will pull the latest image built with the basic scheme and the doc tree (without source tree). latest-{,doc,src,doc-src} is an alias for latest-full-{,doc,src,doc-src} (i.e. we default to scheme full).

Note for users of schemes other than full: if you tlmgr install another binary they are not added to the PATH automatically because they are not respected by tlmgr path add while building the image. Use tlmgr install binary && tlmgr path add to install new executables.

We are currently providing ARMv8 builds as experimental releases to test multi-architecture Docker builds. If any binary does not work on that platform, please check according to the instructions here whether it is available on that architecture.

Historic releases

We are maintaining images for historic releases from 2013 on. If you need an image for an older TeX Live feel free to file a feature request. We might consider adding older distributions if there is a user base.

Historic releases are tagged as TL{YEAR}-historic, so you could pull for 2018 TL2018-historic, TL2018-historic-doc, TL2018-historic-src or TL2018-historic-doc-src.

Concerning the word historic: Be aware that we will only have one tag associated with one historic release. That does not mean that the images behind that tag will not change. Quite the opposite: Every month, the historic images will be rebuilt and updated if there are updates for the underlying operating system image available. That way we make sure not to ship all too outdated software.

The base image (applications, rootless, ...)

Our images are intended to be consumed as-is, i.e., as Docker images. They are not tailored for any given application or tooling. As one major feature of this image are the preinstalled prerequisites for TeX Live's software to work, the default user is root so you can easily use apt to install more packages. The base image for all our images is built on Debian testing.

As of 2025-02, we provide another user texlive by default which has its own home directory at /home/texlive. It has access to all tools but is not allowed to install any software. We may tailor the texlive user's shell to provide things like automatic indexing of its texmf folder etc. so we advise downstream non-root consumers to use this user. Usage example:

FROM registry.gitlab.com/islandoftex/images/texlive:latest

USER texlive
WORKDIR /home/texlive

Note that when going rootless, you may have to adjust bind mounts etc. with respect to file permissions.

Licensing

The software in terms of the MIT license are the Dockerfiles and test files provided. This does not include the pre-built Docker images we provide. They follow the redistribution conditions of the bundled software.