A free-to-use web-based collaborative LaTeX editor and compiler.
- Robby Lawrence - RobbyLawrence
- Matthew Ferrari - ferrari334
- Paul Davis - pau1davis
- Aaron Brown - A-aronCBrown
- Brett Dowling - Brett-Dowling
LaTeX editor is fully online at www.underbranch.org/editor. Users can download either a .tex or .pdf file of the file they have edited in Underbranch. Users can compile their LaTeX document directly in the editor. Underbranch also allows for collaborative editing, meaning that users can join up in a room and write/edit the same document. Of course, users still have access to the download and compile options in a collaborative room.
Hosting your own instance of Underbranch, while unnecessary, is still technically feasible. The instructions below will walk you through setting up a self-hosted instance of Underbranch.
We recommend any computer with at least 16 GB of RAM. This will ensure that the Node servers that pm2 manages are able to handle requests without issues.You'll also want at least 100 GB of storage so that the compiled documents won't cause out-of-storage issues. While most Linux distros will do fine, we recommend Ubuntu Server. After imaging, run sudo apt update. You'll need the following packages from apt:
nginx(be sure to start and enable the service as well withsudo systemctl start nginx,sudo systemctl enable nginx)pm2texlive-fullmysql-server(make sure you set up a root user with a password; the programs that interact with the database should initialize all tables if they aren't already initialized)certbotpython3-certbot-nginx
After downloading and installing the correct packages, you'll need to enter your router settings and port forward port 80 and 443 to your soon-to-be web server. You can also optionally port forward port 22 for SSH access to the computer.
Following succesful port forwarding, clone this repository to wherever you've set as the root of nginx in your nginx config, usually found at /etc/nginx/sites-available/underbranch. You can also set up HTTPS with certbot from here.
Moving to npm, you'll need to go into the following directories and run npm install:
Underbranch/compileUnderbranch/editorUnderbranch/signin
Finally, we have pm2. We run several Node servers with pm2. Run the following commands from the root of the project directory to finish getting pm2 up and running:
pm2 start compile/server.js --name compilepm2 start signin/server.js --name signinpm2 start editor/server.js --name collabpm2 startuppm2 save
This initializes all Node servers necessary for the project and ensures that they gracefully restart upon reboot.
View License here - Underbranch License
editor/- React-based frontend source code with Monaco editor integrationcompile/- LaTeX compilation scripts and utilitiessignin/- User authentication and sign-in page componentssprint/- Sprint planning and project management filesindex.html- Root landing pagenginx-reload.sh- Server reload utility script
Please reach out with any questions to admin@underbranch.org.