1 Apr 15

Setup LaTeX PDF build using Travis CI

For advance workflow, follow this post: Document building & versioning with TeX document, Git, Continuous Integration & Dropbox

Objective

Setup Travis CI continuous integration and deployment service to build PDF from LaTeX document.

This post presumes that, git, ruby and gem are already installed.

1. Clone harshjv/travis-ci-latex-pdf

git clone https://github.com/harshjv/travis-ci-latex-pdf.git

2. Add tex files

Add your tex files to tex folder of your repository.

3. Configure Travis-CI

3.1. Setup Github repo

• If you have forked this repo, then directly go to Settings option, otherwise, first create a new repository on Github and then, then go to Settings option of your repository.

• Click on Webhooks & Services and then Add service

• Select Travis CI

• Add your Travis CI username and Token

• Add service

3.2. Setup Travis CI

• Go to Travis CI

• Toggle on your repository

3.3. Install Travis Command-line Tool

To configure Travis build to deploy generated PDF to Github releases, we have to get Github OAuth Token. To get it and securely embed it into .travis.yml file, we have to install Travis Command-line Tool

gem install travis -v 1.7.5 --no-rdoc --no-ri
travis setup releases

Provide your Github username and password, to generate token and encrypt it on the go. This will also add it to your .travis.yml file.

3.4. Configure .travis.yml

To deploy our file before get removed by Travis on clean, we have to disable it. Modify .travis.yml content according to following code.

before_install:
- "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-latex-extra texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-recommended dvipng"
script:
- mkdir _build
- pdflatex -output-directory _build tex/your_file_1.tex
- pdflatex -output-directory _build tex/your_file_2.tex
deploy:
  provider: releases
  api_key:
    secure: [YOUR KEY]
  file:
  - _build/your_file_1.pdf
  - _build/your_file_2.pdf
  skip_cleanup: true
  on:
    tags: true

4. Git commit, tag and push

In order to build PDF, we must commit changes and tag it to a version/release. Then push it to remote Github repository.

git add . --all
git commit -m "Message"
git tag draft-1
git push -u origin master --tags

5. Hooray

After a successful build, you can see your PDF files available at releases under your Github repository.