5. Personalizing your instance

Personalizing your instance

Before we start your Overleaf instance for the first time we're going to update the config/variables.env configuration file with your custom information.

Open the config/variables.env file using your favourite text editor and update each of the following environment variables with the required information.

Name	Description	Example
OVERLEAF_SITE_URL	Where your instance of Overleaf is publicly available. This is used in public links, and when connecting over websockets, so must be configured correctly!	https://overleaf.lilliput.com
OVERLEAF_EMAIL_FROM_ADDRESS	This email address will be used as the from address for all outgoing emails.	[e-mail]
OVERLEAF_ADMIN_EMAIL	The email address where users can reach the person who runs the site.	[e-mail]

Once you have updated these environment variables, save and quit - you're now ready to start your instance for the first time.

To start your instance run the following command:

bin/up

This command will download all the required images, create the containers (using your customizations) and start up the instance. You should see some log output from the various Docker containers. You can start them up again (without attaching to the log output) by running bin/start.

The Toolkit uses docker compose to manage the Overleaf Docker containers. The Toolkit provides a set of scripts which wrap docker compose, and takes care of most of the details for you.

If all goes well, you should be able view the log in page for your new Overleaf instance by navigating to http://127.0.0.1/ or http://localhost/ in your browser.

Depending on your network configuration and where your Overleaf instance is being hosted you may need to make some additional configuration changes. See the Toolkit settings section for more details.

That's it for the initial part of installation. You can now move onto the Post installation tasks where you'll create your first administrator account and First example project.