Upgrading TeX Live

To save bandwidth, both the Overleaf Community Edition and Server Pro images only come with a minimal install of TeX Live. You can install more packages or upgrade to a complete TeX Live installation using the tlmgr command in the sharelatex container.

The following instructions only apply to Community Edition installations. We highly recommend that Server Pro users enable Sandboxed Compiles as this provides users with access to the same TeX Live images used on overleaf.com as well as providing isolation between project compiles for enhanced security.

Getting inside the sharelatex container

To start a shell inside the sharelatex container, run

bin/shell

You will get a prompt that looks like:

root@309b192d4030:/#

In the following instructions, we will assume that you are in the container.

Determining your current TeX Live version

TeX Live is released every year around the month of April. Steps for using tlmgr are different depending on whether you are using the current release or an older one. You can check which version of TeX Live you are running with tlmgr --version. For example, this installation runs TeX Live 2021:

tlmgr --version
# tlmgr revision 76773 (2025-11-06 20:43:29 +0100)
# tlmgr using installation: /usr/local/texlive/2025
# TeX Live (https://tug.org/texlive) version 2025

The current release of TeX Live can be found on the TeX Live homepage.

If you are running an older TeX Live version, you have two options. A new version of the Overleaf Docker image is usually released shortly after a TeX Live release, you can either wait for it and upgrade your deployment using bin/upgrade script, or, if you prefer to keep the older TeX Live release, you will first need to tell tlmgr to use a historic repository. You will find instructions for doing so here.

Updating packages

# Update the package manager
tlmgr update --self
# Update all installed LaTeX packages
tlmgr update --all

Installing packages

To install a complete TeX Live installation, run this command inside the sharelatex container:

tlmgr install scheme-full

You can also install individual packages manually:

tlmgr install tikzlings tikzmarmots tikzducks

From 3.3.0 release onwards running tlmgr path add is required again after every use of tlmgr install, in order to correctly symlink all the binaries into the system path.

tlmgr path add

Many more commands are available. Find out more with: tlmgr help

When you're done, type exit or press Control-D to exit the shell.

Saving your changes

The changes you've just made have changed the sharelatex container, but they are ephemeral -- they will be lost if Docker Compose recreates the container, e.g. as part of updating the config.

To make them persistent, use docker commit to save the changes to a new docker image:

cat config/version 
# 6.1.1
docker commit sharelatex sharelatex/sharelatex:6.1.1-with-texlive-full
# sha256:ceaa24dd3f01dfd390eebe92ac0317d1d03b6a1baf8fd08e74c309b461416687
echo 6.1.1-with-texlive-full > config/version

After committing the changes, update the config/version accordingly. Then run bin/up -d, to recreate the sharelatex container.

You will need to repeat these steps each time you upgrade to a new Overleaf version.