Awesome

tex2svg

This program listens on port 9292 for a GET or POST request containing a TeX fragment representing a Tikz picture. It returns a rendering of the picture as an SVG document.

There are two request parameters:

type: [ tikzpicture | tikzcd ]<br/> tex: the body of the picture (i.e., everything after the \begin{tikzpicture} and before the \end{tikzpicture}). If you need some non-default Tikz libraries, you can embed a \usetikzlibrary{...} in your tex.

The type parameter is optional, and defaults to tikzpicture.

Docker

The easiest way to deploy this program is using Docker. To create a Docker image,

docker build -t=tex2svg .

Then you can either run the image locally, using

docker run -d -p 9292:9292 tex2svg

or deploy it to a remote server

docker save tex2svg | gzip > tex2svg.tar.gz
scp tex2svg.tar.gz <server-address>:<path-to-tex2svg.tar.gz>

followed by

gunzip -c <path-to-tex2svg.tar.gz> | docker load
docker run -d -p 9292:9292 tex2svg

on the server.

The size of the Docker image is 1.09 GB, which is very modest compared to (just!) a full texlive installation.

Heroku

Heroku also support Docker deployments,

heroku apps:create [APPNAME]
heroku stack:set container -a [APPNAME]
git push heroku master

Alternatively you can install it manually, as follows.

Installation

The program requires a working TeX installation and the pdf2svg commandline application (which, in turn, requires the poppler-glib library).

Customize the locations of pdflatex and pdf2svg in the config.yml file. (Other configuration options include what interfaces the program binds to and what port it listens on.)
Run the command

bundle install --path vendor/bundle

Running

Then you can start the server with

bundle exec rackup

bundle exec rackup --daemon

to run it as a daemon.

Only a subset of TeX commands are supported, in addition to the command supported by tikzpicture/tikzcd.

Testing

The test suite is still a little sparse. You can run the tests with

bundle exec rake test