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rules_latex

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Bazel rules for building LaTeX documents with the Tectonic typesetting engine.

load("@rules_latex//latex:defs.bzl", "latex_document")

latex_document(
    name = "cv",
    main = "cv.tex",
    srcs = ["cv.tex"],
)

That's it. No package enumeration, no checked-in tarballs, no system LaTeX install. bazel build //:cv works on a fresh machine.

What you get

  • Zero-config builds

    Drop a latex_document into a BUILD.bazel; the rule automatically primes a per-document package cache the first time you build, then runs every subsequent compile offline against it. No DEPS = [...] list, no tectonic.bundle() boilerplate.

    Getting started

  • First-class bibliography

    A vendored biber toolchain (pinned to match the bundle's biblatex) is staged onto PATH at compile time. Just biber = True and your \addbibresource directives Just Work.

    Bibliography

  • Overleaf-style live preview

    bazel run //:cv_web stands up a localhost HTTP server with PDF.js rendering. Edit cv.tex, see the PDF update within a second. Click anywhere in the PDF to jump to the corresponding source line via SyncTeX.

    Live preview

  • Hermetic and reproducible

    Every action is sandboxed; the tectonic binary, the package bundle, and biber are all content-addressed. Set reproducible = True for byte-identical PDFs across clean builds. CI verifies this on every push.

    Hermetic builds

Why a new ruleset?

The pre-existing bazel_latex wraps a traditional TeX Live install and requires you to declare every LaTeX package you use as an explicit Bazel target. That's hermetic but verbose: a typical thesis BUILD file ends up with a 30-entry DEPS = [...] list.

rules_latex takes a different approach. Tectonic resolves \usepackage{...} directives from its own package bundle; we just need to keep that bundle hermetically pinned and let Bazel cache the per-document subset.

See the Design rationale for the full story.

Compatibility

Layer Pinned version
Bazel 8.0+ (Bzlmod-only)
Tectonic 0.16.9
biber / biblatex 2.17 / 3.17 (paired by control-file format)
TeX Live 2022 (frozen — see Roadmap)

Project status

Layer Status
Core rules (document, library, pkg, test) Stable since v0.1.0
Toolchain (tectonic, bundle, biber) Stable since v0.2.0
Live preview (serve, serve_web) Stable since v0.2.0
SyncTeX reverse-sync Stable since v0.2.0
Implicit cache pipeline Stable since v0.2.0
Self-hosted PDF.js Stable since v0.2.0
Modern biblatex (3.18+) Blocked on upstream bundle refresh (#1)
Linux arm64 biber Pending v0.3 (build from source)
SyncTeX forward-sync Future