$Id: repository-setup.txt 46888 2018-03-08 08:10:07Z preining $
(This document is public domain.)

How to set up your own TeX Live Packages repository
===================================================
TeX Live 2008 and later contain the TeX Live Manager, which allows 
updates over the network. By specifying different installation sources
the user can in theory install packages using tlmgr from a different
source as the default TeX Live repository.

This document describes how to set up a repository in a way that tlmgr
can use it. Possible applications include distribution of company-internal
packages or non-free stuff not included in TeX Live.

The current document is based on the status of the TeX Live repository
scripts as of 2018-02-13.

Please write tex-live@tug.org if questions or suggestions.

Contents
--------
0. Preliminaries
1. Prerequisites
2. Preparing the "repository"
3. tlpsrc files
4. Creating the TeX Live Database
5. Adjusting the revision numbers
6. Making the web distribution
7. Testing your distribution
8. Signing repositories
9. Example update script


0. Preliminaries
----------------
First of all, before you start with providing your own packages, please
be reminded that you should take good care not to
- overwrite files which are in a different package
  The current system does NOT check for files that got overwritten
- take care not to hose the rest of the TeX Live system,
  imagine you install a package that removes/deletes tlmgr --
  the user will hardly be able to revert to any working state!
- test, test, and again TEST before shipping your stuff
- might be good to alert us at tex-live@tug.org so that we can take a look
  and comment, or check for other problems. Also, if we change something
  in the infrastructure you have a better chance in getting notifications
  and better treatment ;-)

In principle what you have to do is to set up some directory in a layout
paralleling the one in our repository under Master. See
http://www.tug.org/texlive/svn/ for details on accessing our repo.

That means, with ROOT as the root of your local "repository":
	ROOT/tlpkg/		infrastructure stuff, modules, scripts
	ROOT/texmf-dist/	stuff where you should put your 
				TeX code, fonts etc

After that you call the very same scripts as we do when building the
distribution database in
	ROOT/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb

Finally you create/update your web distribution from that ROOT.

The repository can then be used either on a one-time basis with
  tlmgr --repository URL-of-your-repo <action>
or by permanently adding it to the used repositories with
  tlmgr repository add URL-of-your-repo <tagname>
Please see the documentation of tlmgr (tlmgr -help or man tlmgr) for
details.


1. Prerequisites
----------------
You need from the TeX Live Repository (see http://www.tug.org/texlive/svn/)
the contents of at least
	Master/tlpkg/TeXLive		the perl modules
	Master/tlpkg/bin		the scripts for managing
These files can be checked out via svn, or downloaded from the net.
We recommend svn, so that you can easily update them regularly.

Note that it is not necessary to have the above files and the files
you are distributing in the same file hierarchy. It is completely valid
to have a full or partial checkout of TeX Live (svn or git) and use 
the scripts from there. See Section 9 for an example management script.



2. Preparing your repository
----------------------------
You will have to deal with two different folders on your system:
* The preparation place, where you collect the files of the packages
  and create the necessary configuration files.
  We will refer to this folder as
    ROOT
  In TeX Live this would be the subversion repository.
* The generated repository which will be synced to some web server
  and accessed via tlmgr. This folder will be generated and maintained
  by the scripts mentioned in this document.
  We will refer to this folder as
    NETROOT
  In TeX Live this would be the 'tlnet' folder.

Note that ROOT and NETROOT should be different!

Put all of YOUR files in a TDS compliant way into the texmf-dist folder:
	ROOT/texmf-dist
Usage of 'texmf' as tree is strongly discouraged but still possible.

IMPORTANT: Create the directory
  ROOT/texmf-dist/web2c
(in case of a git repository put in a dummy .dont-delete-me to make sure
the directory is present). tl-update-tlpdb and tl-update-containers rely
on this directory existence to determine the type of repository
(files based or container based).

If you really want to replace packages with files in texmf, please think
twice, and maybe contact us before.


3. tlpsrc files
---------------
Now you have to create several TeX Live Package Source files, .tlpsrc files
and place them into
	ROOT/tlpkg/tlpsrc

You have to have two .tlpsrc file for each package you want to ship, and
furthermore three configuration files for the overall installation:
  00texlive.config.tlpsrc
  00texlive.installation.tlpsrc
These files can be copied from the main TeX Live repository, and only
00texlive.config.tlpsrc needs adjustment. This package defines some 
basic configurations for the tlpdb, like how it announces itself,
whether separate src and doc containers are build, and the release 
years it supports.

In the end the generate "package" 00texlive.config should contain
(at least) the following lines:
	category TLCore
	depend container_format/xz
	depend release/NNNN-YOUR_ID

and might optionally contain:
	depend container_split_src_files/1
	depend container_split_doc_files/1
	depend minrelease/MMMM-YOUR_ID

The 
	depend container_format/xz
is *obligatory* because currently we do NOT support any other format.

The "container_split_src_files" and "container_split_doc_files" are
options, they specify whether at a later stage the container script will
generate separate .tar.xz archives for source and doc files, or put
all of them into one .tar.xz. It is up to you. TeX Live uses splitting
of src and doc files. For users there is hardly any difference.
The default is splitting source and doc files out.

Finally, the 
	depend release/NNNN-YOUR_ID
and (optionally)
	depend minrelease/MMMM-YOUR_ID
determine(s) which release(s) of TL your repository works with.
If minrelease is present, the year specified in the local (user's) 
installation's $TLConfig::ReleaseYear must be in the range 
[minrelease,release].  
If minrelease is not present, the release/NNNN value must exactly 
match the TL release number NNNN.
For example, you might have:
	depend release/2010-myorg
and if your packages work with both TL'09 and TL'10, you could add:
	depend minrelease/2009-myorg


For the rest of your package you should create .tlpsrc files describing
their content. Either copy one of our .tlpsrc files, or (much better) 
PLEASE read the documentation of TLPSRC.pm (in POD format).

For local packages or those that are not in the TeX catalogue it is
nice to provide descriptions in the two fields
  shortdesc
  longdesc
again, see the TLPSRC.pm documentation.

If you want to use the auto-generated patterns we are using in TeX Live 
you have to copy our 00texlive.autopatterns.tlpsrc into your tlpkg/tlpsrc
directory.

Some guidelines: For simple packages, say a LaTeX package foobar, put all
the files in 
	ROOT/texmf-dist/tex/latex/foobar/
	ROOT/texmf-dist/source/latex/foobar/
	ROOT/texmf-dist/doc/latex/foobar/
then create a two-line .tlpsrc file foobar.tlpsrc containing:
	category Package
(that is all). The rest will be automatically done by our scripts. If you
want to understand that, read the section on auto-generated patterns in 
the TLPSRC.pm documentation (and don't forget to copy 
00texlive.autopatterns.tlpsrc).

For more documentation concerning patterns and autopatterns, see the
POD documentation in TLPSRC.pm.


4. Creating the TeX Live Database
---------------------------------
If you have set up all your local files, and the tlpsrc files, you can 
create the TeX Live Database in ROOT/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb by calling
	perl PATH-TO/tl-update-tlpdb OPTIONS
from within ROOT. Here PATH-TO points to the directory Master/tlpkg/bin
in your TeX Live checkout, or where you have saved the files from
TeXLive and tlpkg directories.

How revision numbers are computed and which files are used can be controlled
by one of the several -from-XXXX options. By default Subversion is used.
Other options, if your repository is not subversion based, are
  -from-files          use find to get list of files, revisions are all 1
  -from-git            use git and compute the history (number of commits)
  -from-gitsvn         use git over svn repo

By default tl-update-tlpdb uses all tlpsrc files present in 
ROOT/tlpkg/tlpsrc/. Presumably this won't be very many files.
But if you like, you can specify individual package names together 
with -tlpsrc-from-cmdline.

You can add the option
	-with-w32-pattern-warning
which will warn on missing files for Windows; some of those warnings are
by default suppressed.

Another option that might be of interest is
	-no-reverse-revision-check
Normally if there is an old tlpdb the packages in the new one are compared
with the packages in the old one and checked that the revisions are
increasing.

Passing in 
  -master ROOT
should allow you to run the script from an arbitrary directory, but
we recommend running it from within the ROOT folder.

As usual, please read the documentation of tl-update-tlpdb (again in POD)
for further information.

That process will probably show you some warnings; read them carefully.

After it runs successfully, you should have a file
	ROOT/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
	
Your next job is to check that your new texlive.tlpdb has the files you
expected in the corresponding packages that you expected.  Go through
the entire file (each package starts with a line "name foobar") and
the file list..

If you are not content, work on your patterns to fix that.

There are some scripts in tlpkg/bin/ starting with "check-" which you might
use for doing some checks on your repository.


5. Adjusting the revision numbers
---------------------------------
If you used -from-files above all the revision numbers in the generated
texlive.tlpdb will be set to 0:
	revision 0
The revision is used for checking which package is newer. So if you 
have different "releases" of a package you should increase the revision
number from one step to the next.

If you want to change that, there are several options:
- do it by hand in the texlive.tlpdb
  ... if you can remember what numbers you already shipped

- do it automatically with some script which takes into account the already
  shipped version of the packages, or the version of the package in
  the main TeX Live repository (if you replace a TeX Live package)
  An example for doing that take a look at our repository
  tlpkg/etc/tlrepo-from-minimals.pl

- use either subversion or git for your repository and get automatically
  increasing numbers.


6. Making the web distribution
------------------------------
Now that the texlive.tlpdb has been set up, revision numbers adjusted, you
can create or update your web distribution with
	perl PATH-TO/tl-update-containers OPTIONS

OPTIONS:
-location NETROOT
The -location gives the place where your former distribution was or where
it should be created. In the former case only those containers with larger
revision numbers are recreated. In the latter case all containers are
created.

-master ROOT
The option -master defines the location of *your* files, that is ROOT
in this document.

-all
Update all containers

-no-sign
-gpgcmd
See below for information about signing repositories.

For other options, please see the documentation (in POD) of
tl-update-containers.


7. Testing your distribution
----------------------------
Having completed all these steps, you can test your distribution by calling
the TeX Live Manager with the location argument. Continuing the above
example we use NETROOT:
	tlmgr -location NETROOT update --list
or 
	tlmgr -location NETROOT update --all
or 
	tlmgr -location NETROOT list
etc.  Please see the documentation of tlmgr (POD again) for details.


8. Signing repositories
-----------------------
Since 2016 tlmgr is able to check cryptographic signatures and thus
verify that the downloaded packages are what is distributed by the
author/maintainer (you reading this document).

If you don't want to sign, please pass
  -no-sign
to tl-update-containers above.

If you want to sign you should provide a signing script that accepts
one file name and creates a detached signature for that file.
Note that in this case you should publish your public key, and ask users
to import your public key with 
  tlmgr key add ...
(see documentation of tlmgr for details).

You can use the signing script used in TeX Live by setting the
following environment variable:
  TL_GNUPGOPTS="--local-user 0xYOUR_ID"



9. Example update script
------------------------
For the TeX Live Contrib repository which is managed in git, I have the 
following files:
ROOT/bin/...
    /texmf-dist
               /web2c/.dont-delete-this-dir
               /....   all the other files are also under texmf-dist
    /tlpkg
          /tlpsrc
                 /00texlive.autopatterns.tlpsrc
                 /00texlive.config.tlpsrc
                 /00texlive.installation.tlpsrc
                 /...tlpsrc   all the other .tlpsrc files, mostly empty
          /texlive.tlpdb 
    /update.sh
    
I am using the following script update.sh (more or less, for details
see the git repo of tlcontrib):

TLCHECKOUT=${TLCHECKOUT:-$HOME/Development/TeX/texlive.git}
TLNETDEST=${TLNETDEST:-$HOME/Domains/server/texlive.info/contrib/2017}
TLCATALOGUE=${TLCATALOGUE:-$HOME/Development/TeX/texcatalogue-svn}

# signing options
TL_GNUPGOPTS="--local-user 0xYOUR_ID"
export TL_GNUPGOPTS

$TLCHECKOUT/Master/tlpkg/bin/tl-update-tlpdb \
    -with-w32-pattern-warning \
    -from-git \
    -catalogue=$TLCATALOGUE \
    -master=`pwd`

$TLCHECKOUT/Master/tlpkg/bin/tl-update-containers \
    -master `pwd` \
    -location $TLNETDEST    \
    -all # sometimes we need -recreate


===================================================================

Closing remark:
We cannot repeat it often enough, please don't play around with files not
belonging to your packages. That is dangerous!


If you have further comments, questions, additions to this file please
let us know at tex-live@tug.org.


Last changed 2018-03-08 by np
