How to use this plugin with containerized LaTeX?

[pozix604]

I use LaTeX with a Docker image. It's an unorthodox way to LaTeX, but it has the benefit of staying updated and not needing to install anything.

I mostly use a Makefile to do the LaTeX work:

SHELL := /bin/bash

TEXLIVE_IMAGE = registry.gitlab.com/islandoftex/images/texlive:latest
TEXLIVE  = podman run --rm -it --group-add keep-groups -v `pwd`:/workdir $(TEXLIVE_IMAGE)

default: FORCE
        $(TEXLIVE) latexmk main.tex

update: FORCE
        podman pull $(TEXLIVE_IMAGE)

FORCE:

What's a good use to use this plugin with this setup?

I get "not an executable" errors because the executables are not directly on my computer. Anyway to route these through the container and/or disable?

[lervag]

Interesting.

It's an unorthodox way to LaTeX, but it has the benefit of staying updated and not needing to install anything.

I mean, you are installing Podman and docker stuff, and you are pulling a large docker image. And you are updating, although you may be doing it manually just by pulling the updated image. On my system, installing texlive is simply sudo pacman -S texlive, and it is automatically updated when I update my system - which everyone should do regularly. So to be honest, I really don't see the benefit to your approoach.

Still, I think people should be allowed to do things their own ways. And I believe we can make this work well also with VimTeX. The main thing is to change the executable. I believe the main thing you want here is for VimTeX to run the podman run --rm … latexmk command. Now, VimTeX wants you to provide an executable, so in this case, I think the simplest solution is to make a wrapper shell script, e.g. latexmk-wrapper.sh, something like this:

#!/bin/bash

podman run --rm -it --group-add keep-groups -v `pwd`:/workdir \
  registry.gitlab.com/islandoftex/images/texlive:latest \
  latexmk $@

Now you can configure VimTeX with

let g:vimtex_compiler_latexmk = {
      \ 'executable' : '/path/to/latexmk-wrapper.sh',
      \}

[pozix604]

The primary benefit is that I just install one program and then all other programs are just containers. I keep the OS installation itself minimal.

The other is that I use Debian and if I used TeX from the repository I would be on the 2023 version. :)

[lervag]

Cool, thanks for sharing.

By the way, notice that GitHub discussions allow you to both add new replies to your original post ("Add a comment") and replies to specific replies ("Write a reply"). That is, it allows different threads. And your latest reply should have been as a reply to my answer. By following this convention it makes it easier to group related posts/answers/comments.