Exporting projects

In Server Pro and Community Edition 5.4.0 we have included a script that allows Administrators to export all user projects (including those still visible in the Deleted and Trashed folders) to a directory on disk.

The output from running this script is the same as manually downloading a Zip of all projects from the user's project dashboard. The script will flush any pending changes before starting the download to ensure that the export contains the latest version of the project.

Limitations

The export script has the following limitations:

• No project settings, such as the TeX Live image name or compiler, are exported. These must be set when the project is uploaded to the user's account.

• Exported projects don't contain any version history.

• No collaborator information is preserved. Projects will need to be reshared. If using link-sharing, View and Edit links will be regenerated (they won't be the same as before).

• Any comments and tracked change information won't be exported.

• Project chat history won't be exported.

This script is not designed to replace a full system backup. To ensure you can recover your instance in a disaster recovery sceneario we strongly recommend taking a consistent backup.

Flags

Name	Description
--help	Show help
--user-id	The user ID (required unless using --export-all or --project-id)
--project-id	Export a single project (cannot be used with --user-id or --export-all)
--list	List user's projects (cannot be used with --output)
--output	Output zip file (for single export operations)
--export-all	Export all users' projects (requires --output-dir)
--output-dir	Directory for storing all users' export files
--log-level	Log level s supported: trace|debug|info|warn|error|fatal Default: error

Usage

Use the following command to export projects for all users:

# Overleaf Toolkit users
$ bin/docker-compose exec sharelatex /bin/bash -ce "source /etc/container_environment.sh && cd /overleaf/services/web && node modules/server-ce-scripts/scripts/export-user-projects.mjs --export-all --output-dir=/var/lib/overleaf/data/exports"

# Legacy docker-compose.yml users
docker exec sharelatex /bin/bash -ce "source /etc/container_environment.sh && cd /overleaf/services/web && node modules/server-ce-scripts/scripts/export-user-projects.mjs --export-all --output-dir=/var/lib/overleaf/data/exports"

If you are running Server Pro or Community Editition <= 3.5.13 you will need to update the above example to use the export-legacy-user-projects.js script.

Completion

Once the export is completed, you can access the files via the directory on the host that is bind-mounted to /var/lib/overleaf in your docker-compose.yml file or the OVERLEAF_DATA_PATH environment variable in the config/overleaf.rc file if you are using the Toolkit.

Overleaf currently allows for duplicate project names. If a user's project contains a duplicate, these projects will still be added to the user's Zip export, but when extracted, only one version will be present. On Linux, unzip -B will write files with the same name as backup files instead of overwriting.