I am looking for a Python-style virtualenv or venv to create a virtual environment where I can install LaTeX packages such that the packages are available to my current LaTeX project only (but not available system-wide).
I am expecting something like the following:
- Create a virtual-environment path, say,
./venv
. - Set some environment variables or modify
tlmgr install
commands such that new packages are installed into./venv
with the proper directory structure. - Set some environment variables or modify
pdflatex
commands such that the new documents I compile use packages from the./venv
directory along with the packages in the system-wide paths that came with Tex Live distribution. - I do not however want to hardcode any
./venv
paths in the LaTeX documents (the.tex
files). The source code in the.tex
file should be agnostic of whether it is being compiled with a virtual environment or not.
Best Answer
You can use TeX Live's user mode for that purpose. As you have already mentioned in the comments, you can create a new user tree (allowing multiple trees) using
To install a package in this tree you have to pass the user tree and the option
--usermode
To run LaTeX you have to give it a hint where to look for user packages, by setting the
TEXMFHOME
variable. You can either do this separately for each runor globally for the current shell by exporting the name (use
unset
to exit the “virtual environment”)