This project started as a proof of concept to compare templates for Microsoft Word and LaTeX templates. In the past when I have used LaTeX I was always very satisfied with the result, and I think the additional benefits of source control and CI/CD made this option very compelling.
This repo takes advantage of dev containers, which natively works with GitHub Codespaces allowing me to develop the project within a browser quite easily for quick changes.
Building a LaTeX project locally normally requires a LaTeX environment which can be relatively painful to setup and there are numerous ways to do it incorrectly. I've found it much easier to run LaTeX within a container and follow the installation steps of other projects and developers who use LaTeX much more seriously.
Instead, for this project you only need to install a few things:
- Docker
- VS Code
- Visual Studio Code Remote - Containers Extension (optional)
That's basically it. There's more detailed documentation about using remote containers within VS Code that may be helpful for setup. Once everything is installed, VS Code will pull a Docker image (based on the Dockerfile) and run a container locally based on the arguments in devcontainer.json. This includes the automatic installation of a VS Code server and LaTeX Workshop extension inside the container for syntax highighting, intellisense, automatic builds, and PDF previews.
The Dockerfile is set up to mount a volume at /data, and the devcontainer.json specifies arguments to mount the workspace within the container. Build artifacts are dropped into /data/out.
If you prefer to develop without VS Code, or without the containers extension, you can run docker commands directly to build the result. The results/artifacts will be in the out directory.
docker build -t latex-build .
docker run -v $PWD:/data -w /data/src latex-build ./build.shThis repo is set up to automatically build PRs, and release the newly built artifacts on merge to main. See .github for the workflow definitions. New docker images are only built/pushed in PRs if the Dockerfile differs from what's in the main branch, allowing for a quick dev cycle when not developing locally (like when making changes directly in GitHub - this repo is for a document after all).
This is what it looks like to develop locally, using the Dev Container in VS Code. On save, the file is rebuilt and automatically refreshed (thanks to the james-yu.latex-workshop extension).
Some of the ideas for how to create my Dockerfile came from the Overleaf project as well as blang/latex-docker. I also recommend Overleaf for getting started writing LaTeX documents without requiring a complicated local setup - and they also allow you to self-host with Docker which can be very convenient.
The resume template itself comes from darwiin/yaac-another-awesome-cv which provides a LaTeX class and was an amazing starting point for my resume.