texlive

A "batteries-included" LaTeX toolchain in a Docker image: texlive-full + latexmk + biber on debian:trixie-slim. Built for academic writing — heavy math, biblatex/biber, TikZ/pgfplots, German babel + fontspec.

Multi-arch: linux/amd64 and linux/arm64, so it runs natively on an Asahi Mac (arm64) and an Arch desktop (amd64) alike.

ghcr.io/agresdominik/texlive:latest

Pull

docker pull ghcr.io/agresdominik/texlive:latest

Docker picks the right arch from the manifest automatically.

Use

The image's entrypoint is latexmk with WORKDIR /data, so anything after the image name is passed straight to latexmk.

`tex` wrapper

Mounts the current directory into the container and fixes file ownership so output isn't root-owned (--user + a writable HOME for TeX's cache).

zsh function — drop into ~/.zshrc:

tex() {
  docker run --rm \
    --user "$(id -u):$(id -g)" \
    -e HOME=/tmp \
    -v "$PWD:/data" \
    ghcr.io/agresdominik/texlive:latest "$@"
}

Or use the standalone tex script — put it on your $PATH:

install -m755 tex ~/.local/bin/tex

Then:

tex -pdf main.tex      # build
tex -pvc main.tex      # watch + rebuild
tex -C                 # clean aux files

How the multi-arch build works

.github/workflows/build.yml builds natively per arch — no QEMU:

A matrix build job runs once on ubuntu-24.04 (amd64) and once on ubuntu-24.04-arm (arm64). Each builds for its own platform and pushes a per-arch tag: :<sha>-amd64, :<sha>-arm64.
A final manifest job merges those into single multi-arch tags with docker buildx imagetools create, publishing both :latest and :<sha>.

Auth is GITHUB_TOKEN with packages: write, logging in to ghcr.io. Triggers: push to main and manual workflow_dispatch.

Trimming the image later

texlive-full is large (multiple GB). If size becomes a problem, swap the Debian package for a custom TeX Live install driven by a texlive.profile, selecting scheme-full down to e.g. scheme-medium plus only the collections you need (collection-latexextra, collection-bibtexextra, collection-pictures, collection-langgerman, collection-fontsrecommended, …). Build with install-tl --profile texlive.profile, then tlmgr install any stragglers. Keep scheme-full until the size actually hurts.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

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