This is a Heroku buildpack for working with TeX documents. In its raw form, it simply bundles a working TeX Live environment into your Heroku app and doesn't do anything else with it.

$ ls

$ heroku create --buildpack git://github.com/mezis/heroku-buildpack-tex.git

$ git push heroku master
...
-----> Heroku receiving push
-----> Fetching custom build pack... done
-----> TeX app detected
-----> Fetching TeX Live 20120511
...

This can be useful if you simply want to play around with TeX Live without having to build or install it yourself. You can pull it up on your instance easily in bash:

$ heroku run bash

This buildpack allow to install multiple variants of TeX Live. Those are built with the built.sh script, and uploaded to S3.

The default version is currently 20150411-p2.

It can be useful to run the exact same binaries locally (or for instance, on a CI server).

The install.sh script is hosted with the buildpack binaries; to install, just

curl -skL https://goo.gl/FR7t9V | bash

This will by default install the current version to ./vendor/texlive. You can specify a particular version or prefix:

curl -skL https://goo.gl/FR7t9V | bash -s -- -v 20150411-p0 -p /opt/texlive

Binaries are provided for x86_64-linux and x86_64-darwin.

More likely, you'll want to use it as part of a larger project, which needs to build PDFs. The easiest way to do this is with a multipack, where this is just one of the buildpacks you'll be working with.

$ cat .buildpacks
git://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python.git
git://github.com/mezis/heroku-buildpack-tex.git

$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=git://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

This will bundle TeX Live into your instance without impacting your existing system. You can then call out to executables like pdflatex as you would on any other machine.