Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
71 lines (46 loc) · 2.88 KB

docker-compose.md

File metadata and controls

71 lines (46 loc) · 2.88 KB
Raw

Working with Docker Compose Services

The Overleaf Toolkit runs Overleaf inside a docker container, plus the supporting databases (MongoDB and Redis), in their own containers. All of this is orchestrated with docker compose.

Note: for legacy reasons, the main Overleaf container is called sharelatex, and is based on the sharelatex/sharelatex docker image. This is because the technology is based on the ShareLaTeX code base, which was merged into Overleaf. See this blog post for more details. At some point in the future, this will be renamed to match the Overleaf naming scheme.

The bin/docker-compose Wrapper

The bin/docker-compose script is a wrapper around docker compose. It loads configuration from the config/ directory, before invoking docker compose with whatever arguments were passed to the script.

You can treat bin/docker-compose as a transparent wrapper for the docker compose program installed on your machine.

For example, we can check which containers are running with the following:

$ bin/docker-compose ps

Convenience Helpers

In addition to bin/docker-compose, the toolkit also provides a collection of convenient scripts to automate common tasks:

  • bin/up: shortcut for bin/docker-compose up
  • bin/start: shortcut for bin/docker-compose start
  • bin/stop: shortcut for bin/docker-compose stop
  • bin/shell: starts a shell inside the main container

Architecture

Inside the overleaf container, the Overleaf software runs as a set of micro-services, managed by runit. Some of the more interesting files inside the container are:

  • /etc/service/: initialisation files for the microservices
  • /etc/overleaf/settings.js: unified settings file for the microservices
  • /var/log/overleaf/: logs for each microservice
  • /var/www/overleaf/: code for the various microservices
  • /var/lib/overleaf/: the mount-point for persistent data (corresponds to the directory indicated by OVERLEAF_DATA_PATH on the host)

Before Server Pro/Community Edition version 5.0, the paths used the ShareLaTeX brand.

The MongoDB and Redis Containers

Overleaf dedends on two external databases: MongoDB and Redis. By default, the toolkit will provision a container for each of these databases, in addition to the Overleaf container, for a total of three docker containers.

If you would prefer to connect to an existing MongoDB or Redis instance, you can do so by setting the appropriate settings in the overleaf.rc configuration file.

Viewing Individual Micro-Service Logs

The bin/logs script allows you to select individual log streams from inside the overleaf container. For example, if you want to see just the logs for the web and clsi (compiler) micro-services, run:

$ bin/logs -f web clsi

See the output of bin/logs --help for more options.