Installation

rules_latex is a Bazel module. Add it to your MODULE.bazel:

bazel_dep(name = "rules_latex", version = "0.7.0")

tectonic = use_extension("@rules_latex//latex/toolchain:extensions.bzl", "tectonic")
tectonic.toolchain()
use_repo(tectonic, "rules_latex_tectonic_toolchains")
register_toolchains("@rules_latex_tectonic_toolchains//:all")

That's the entire setup. The first time you build a latex_document, Bazel will:

1. Download the pinned Tectonic binary for your platform (~20 MB).
2. Run Tectonic once against your sources to prime a cache (online).
3. Re-run Tectonic offline against the primed cache to produce the PDF.

The first build typically takes 30–90 seconds on a fast connection; subsequent builds use Bazel's action cache and complete in under five seconds.

Prerequisites

• Bazel 8.0+ (Bzlmod must be enabled). rules_latex is Bzlmod-only by design. CI runs the full test suite against Bazel 8.0.0, 8.7.0, and 9.1.0 on every push and PR, on both Linux x86_64 and macOS arm64.
• An internet connection on first build (for the package prime). Subsequent builds are fully offline.

A system Python installation is not required. Bazel downloads the pinned Python 3.13 runtime used by rules_latex's private build and live-preview tools.

Using rules_python in the consuming module

You can use a different Bazel-managed Python version for your own targets. Every rules_latex tool requests Python 3.13 explicitly, so a consumer target on Python 3.11 or 3.14 keeps that version and does not inherit rules_latex's choice. The cost is an additional platform-specific Python runtime download when the two versions differ.

Bzlmod still selects one rules_python module version for the standard dependency graph. rules_latex declares 1.9.2 as its compatibility floor:

• requesting an older rules_python version normally raises the selected version to 1.9.2;
• requesting a newer version raises the version used to analyse rules_latex's Python targets as well.

The repository tests both ends of this interaction with consumer fixtures: Bazel 8.0 + rules_python 1.9.2 + Python 3.11, and Bazel 9.1 + rules_python 2.3.2 + Python 3.14. The latter needs Bazel 9 because rules_python 2.3.2's MODULE file uses flag_alias; that restriction comes from the selected rules_python release. Consumers should still declare their own direct bazel_dep on rules_python when they load its rules.

Verifying the install

Create cv.tex:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, rules\_latex!
\end{document}

And a BUILD.bazel:

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

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

Then:

bazel build //:cv

You should end up with bazel-bin/cv.pdf.

Optional: opt into the full pinned bundle

By default, rules_latex uses its implicit cache pipeline (a one-time online prime per document, then offline forever). If you'd prefer the full ~1.78 GiB self-hosted bundle approach — useful for monorepos with many documents that share most of the same packages — add:

tectonic.bundle()

after tectonic.toolchain() in your MODULE.bazel. The 1.78 GiB bundle is fetched once and used for every compile, skipping the per-document prime.

See Hermetic builds for the full mode hierarchy.

Modern biblatex extension styles

No extra setup needed. The bundle ships biblatex 3.21 + biber 2.21, so modern extension styles like biblatex-apa, biblatex-chicago, biblatex-ieee, and biblatex-nature work out of the box — just add the style package to ctan_packages and set biber = True. See the bibliography guide for details.

Upgrading from ≤ v0.5? The tectonic.toolchain(modern_biblatex = True) opt-in was removed in v0.6.0 — the rebuilt TeX Live 2026 bundle ships the modern stack natively. Delete that argument from your MODULE.bazel; everything it unlocked is now the default.