NOTE
This repository is no longer maintained.
This is an example on how to use TravisCI.org to automatically build LaTeX documentation and upload it via WebDAV to a Nextcloud server.
The .travis.yml is the minimal config files used for this repository. The resulting PDF file can be found here!
I have used it for various documents in repositories under https://github.com/foss-ag
Features:
- simple
- fast
- flexible
If you are using TOCs, references and other things, you might need to call latex or pdflatex several times until all references are resolved. Usually a TeX-Editor does this automatically for you. It also runs everything in a non-interactive mode and only generates a log and the resulting PDF.
The tool latexmk automatically runs pdflatex as often as needed and optionally reads a configuration file called latexmkrc.
When run without a specific file, it will build all *.tex files in the current directory.
This makes it a great choice for automatic compilation of TeX files!
Among other options, TravisCI allows fully featured Ubuntu 14.04 VMs with sudo permissions as the build environment. They can be enabled by adding sudo: required to the buildfile. But they need over a minute to boot and generally build a little slower.
A better choice is the (default) container based environment. Tho, packages need to be added via the apt plugin. This plugin allows to install whitelisted packages.
The basic packages needed are texlive and latexmk. Installing texlive-full gives all extra LaTeX packages, but increases the build-time to over 15 minutes.
The easiest way to upload to Nextcloud is via WebDAV. Since these credentials need to be known to Travis, it is a good idea to create an extra user who shares the target directory with everyone who needs access to the final files.
The deploy step uses the environment variable $NCPW which is hidden in the log output and thus not made public.
Log into TravisCI.org with your GitHub account and enable it for the repository you want to build. Go to the repository settings, add an environment variable called $NCPW and make sure 'Display value in build log' is off.
Add and edit .travis.yml.full to your liking and commit it.
Enjoy!