rules_tectonic

Bazel rules for compiling LaTeX sources to PDF using tectonic.

Tectonic is self-contained, fast, and pulls TeX Live packages on demand — no system TeX install required. rules_tectonic wraps the upstream prebuilt binaries as a Bazel toolchain and exposes a single rule, tectonic_pdf, that produces a .pdf from a .tex source.

Installation (bzlmod)

# MODULE.bazel
bazel_dep(name = "rules_tectonic", version = "0.1.0")

During early development you can pin to a git commit via git_override:

bazel_dep(name = "rules_tectonic", version = "0.1.0")
git_override(
    module_name = "rules_tectonic",
    remote = "https://github.com/jesssullivan/rules_tectonic.git",
    commit = "<sha>",
)

Usage

# BUILD.bazel
load("@rules_tectonic//tectonic:defs.bzl", "tectonic_pdf")

tectonic_pdf(
    name = "my_paper",
    src = "paper.tex",
    deps = [
        "abstract.tex",
        "intro.tex",
        "sections/methods.tex",
    ],
    data = [
        "figures/plot.pdf",
        "refs.bib",
    ],
)

Then:

bazel build //path/to:my_paper
# -> bazel-bin/path/to/my_paper.pdf

How it works

• A module extension (tectonic_toolchains_ext in //tectonic:extensions.bzl) creates one external repository per supported host platform: @tectonic_linux_amd64, @tectonic_linux_arm64, @tectonic_darwin_amd64, @tectonic_darwin_arm64.
• Each repo downloads the matching prebuilt tectonic binary from tectonic-typesetting/tectonic GitHub releases.
• A toolchain is registered per platform; Bazel picks the right one based on the exec platform.
• tectonic_pdf is a leaf rule that invokes tectonic -X compile <src> --outdir <tmpdir> and moves the resulting PDF to the declared Bazel output.

Overriding the tectonic version

# MODULE.bazel
tectonic_toolchains = use_extension("@rules_tectonic//tectonic:extensions.bzl", "tectonic_toolchains_ext")
tectonic_toolchains.from_version(version = "0.15.0")

You will need to populate matching SRI integrity strings in tectonic/private/platforms.bzl's RELEASE_INTEGRITY table — pin requests are welcome.

Bootstrapping integrity values

For a given tectonic version, the SRI integrity strings of the prebuilt archives can be obtained from bazel build //examples:hello itself: with an empty integrity entry, Bazel will fetch the archive and print the actual value. Copy that into RELEASE_INTEGRITY[version][platform] for verified, repeatable builds.

You can also compute them directly:

curl -sL <archive-url> | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary | base64 | sed 's/^/sha256-/'

Dev shell

A flake.nix is provided. With direnv:

direnv allow   # uses nix flake; provides bazelisk, tectonic, buildifier

Smoke test

bazel build //examples:hello

License

MIT — see LICENSE.