2. Familiarize yourself with the Toolkit

Taking a look around

Now that we have a local copy of the Toolkit, let's take a look at the structure of the repository using the ls command:

ls -l

The ls -l command displays a detailed long listing view of the contents of a directory, providing additional file information such as permissions, ownership and size.

If everything was cloned successfully you should see something like this:

drwxr-xr-x 3 fry fry  4096 Aug 30 14:16 bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 fry fry  6465 Aug 30 14:16 CHANGELOG.md
drwxr-xr-x 2 fry fry  4096 Sep  6 12:43 config
drwxr-xr-x 5 fry fry  4096 Aug 30 14:22 data
drwxr-xr-x 3 fry fry  4096 Aug 30 14:16 doc
drwxr-xr-x 3 fry fry  4096 Aug 30 14:16 lib
-rw-r--r-- 1 fry fry 34520 Aug 30 14:16 LICENSE
-rw-r--r-- 1 fry fry  1178 Aug 30 14:16 README.md

All user-owned configuration files are found in the config/ directory. This directory is excluded from the git revision control system, so it will not be changed by updating the Toolkit.

Name	Description
bin	This folder contains a collection of scripts that help you manage your Overleaf server instance. You can read more about these scripts in our Commands section below.
config	This folder contains your own local configuration files.
lib	This folder contains base configuration files used by the Toolkit.
data	By default this folder contains the storage location for MongoDb, Redis and Overleaf. For more information see Persistent data section below.

We recommend not changing files outside of the /config folder directly. Instead, if you need to make changes, they can be done via environment variables set in either config/variables.env or config/overleaf.rc. For example, to set the mongo service image, rather than manually editing lib/docker-compose.mongo.yml file, you can set the image using the environment variable MONGO_IMAGE in config/overleaf.rc. For more information see the Toolkit settings page.

The Toolkit will not change any data in the config/ directory without your permission.