Overleaf is an online collaborative writing and publishing tool that makes the whole process of writing, editing and publishing scientific documents much quicker and easier. Overleaf provides the convenience of an easy-to-use LaTeX editor with real-time collaboration and the fully compiled output produced automatically in the background as you type.
The Overleaf Toolkit is a set of tools that allow anyone to run their own local version of Overleaf. The Overleaf software is distributed in Docker images, while the toolkit manages the complexity of making those images run on your computer.
Community Edition is the free version of Overleaf, while Server Pro is our enterprise offering, with more features and commercial support. Community Edition is distributed as a docker image on Docker Hub, whereas Server Pro is distributed as a docker image on a private quay.io registry.
When you set up Overleaf using the toolkit, you will start with Community Edition, and can easily switch to Server Pro by changing just one setting.
The toolkit uses Docker and Docker Compose to run the Overleaf software in an isolated sandbox. While we do recommend becoming familiar with both Docker and Docker Compose, we also aim to make it as easy as possible to run Overleaf on your own computer.
The toolkit is distributed as a git repository, here: https://github.com/overleaf/toolkit
If you want to get started right now, we recommend you take a look at the Quick-Start Guide.
If you take a look at the toolkit repository, you will see a file structure like this:
bin/
config/
data/
doc/
lib/
README.md
The README.md file contains some important information about the project. The lib/ directory contains files that are internal to the toolkit, and users should not need to worry about.
By default, the toolkit will put your overleaf data in the data/ directory. This directory is ignored by git, so you don't need to worry about it being over-written by an update to the toolkit code.
Your own configuration files will live in the config/ directory. This directory is also ignored by git, so it won't be over-written by the toolkit.
The bin/ directory contains a collection of scripts, which will be your main interface to the toolkit system. We can start the Overleaf system with bin/start, we can check the logs with bin/logs, and we can back up our configuration with bin/backup-config
You will find all the documentation you need in the doc/ directory. This documentation can also be viewed online, here: https://github.com/overleaf/toolkit/tree/master/doc/