GitHub is a great platform for collaborating on projects that require versioning. Latex documents such as summaries and reports of college courses are a great example: you can collaborate using the git version control system and make the results public and accessible to interested parties.
There is a disadvantage though: git is not suitable for binaries such as the PDFs generated by the Latex compiler. This is a substantial problem: people interested in your document have to clone your repository and compile the source code before they are even able to see the content of your document. Including a link to a compiled version is one of the options, however, when the document is updated frequently, this is all but ideal and merely troubles the author rather than the visitor with the hassle of compiling.
Inspired by the popular Jenkins Continuous Integration tool, I started looking for something similar for Latex. Not finding what I was looking for, I decided to create a tool myself. The result is InTeXration.
What it does:
- It integrates your GitHub repository using a WebHook. Every time commits are pushed a JSON request is posted to the InTeXration server.
- InTeXration clones the repository and compiles the PDF.
- Both the resulting PDF and log file are accessible using a fixed URL.
By including the URL in the repository’s README.md, anyone interested can take a look at the compiled version of your document.
For more info: https://github.com/JDevlieghere/InTeXration