Overleaf and Git

Posted on 5th March 2024

More of a note to myself than anything else. Lancaster University has recently obtained a uni-wide Overleaf license. Overleaf is of course the online LaTeX editing system (as an aside, I didn't realise until now that the underlying web-app is Open Source). I haven't used Overleaf much, as I don't like the idea of needing a stable internet connection to work on my LaTeX files, and have a reasonable system going with MikTeX and VSCode with the LaTeX plugin.

One advantage, however, is collaboration, especially as I can't convince collaborators to work with GitHub. The license is needed to have more than one collaborator, but it also gets you Git integration. Basically, the Overleaf project will act as a Git repository which you can push/pull from (but not branch; still, if I get a collaborator who is up for using branches, then (a) we can just use GitHub; and (b) I need to worry about why my Mathematics article is some complex...)

Some notes to self:

  • Git Integration docs
  • I use an auth token. On my personal computers, I seem to have configured Git for Windows to store passwords / tokens, and nothing needs to be done after the first clone.
  • On my work laptop, I seem to need to run git credential-manager-core configure in the cloned directory. Then things will work as expected.
  • For a new project, now setup a suitable .gitignore file and commit it.
  • You can also sync to Github. Make a new, empty repository on Github, and then use git remote add github <url> where github is an arbitrary name for this remote, and <url> points to the repository on github. You can now pull and push via git push github and git pull github master, the later manually specifying the branch on the Github repository to push to.

Thus, at least in principle, I can now work just on Github, occasionally pushing back to Overleaf. Even better

  • Running git branch -u github/master master now makes git track the Github repository, and git pull and git push now use Github, ignoring Overleaf.
  • git push origin will update to Overleaf.
  • git pull origin master will pull from Overleaf.
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