Overleaf

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 849 words

Overleaf Community Edition gives you the editor, the compiler, real-time collaboration, and project history, and it withholds track changes, comments, Git and Dropbox integration, and single sign-on for the paid Server Pro tier. Whether that split works for you is the entire decision, so settle it before you download anything. A research group that writes papers together and reviews them by passing PDFs around will be happy. A group that lives in the review comments on overleaf.com will notice their absence in the first hour.

Community Edition versus Server Pro, plainly

The sandboxed compile row matters for security more than convenience: in Community Edition every project compiles inside the same container as the application, so a user who can write LaTeX can run shell escapes on your server. Treat the free edition as a tool for people you trust, not a public service.

The Toolkit install is the only one worth doing

The project publishes an Overleaf Toolkit repository that wraps the container stack in a few scripts, and the description of the deployment as bare-metal undersells how much Docker is involved: the Toolkit runs MongoDB, Redis, and the application as containers on whatever host you point it at.

git clone https://github.com/overleaf/toolkit.git overleaf-toolkit
cd overleaf-toolkit
bin/init
# edit config/overleaf.rc for the port and data paths
bin/up -d

Then open http://your-host/launchpad and create the first admin account. That URL only works before any admin exists, so do it immediately. Configuration lives in config/overleaf.rc for infrastructure choices and config/variables.env for application settings like the site name and email; the Toolkit's bin/upgrade handles version bumps, and bin/logs is where you go when a compile hangs. Put your reverse proxy in front for TLS and keep the application container off the public interface.

TeX Live is where the disk goes

The container image ships a minimal TeX Live to keep the download sane, and the first paper someone opens will fail on a missing package within minutes. You have two choices. Install packages one at a time with tlmgr install inside the container as errors appear, or install the full scheme once:

bin/docker-compose exec sharelatex tlmgr install scheme-full

The full scheme is several GB and takes a long time to fetch, and it lives inside the container's filesystem unless you commit the container to a new image or mount the TeX tree as a volume, which means an unplanned bin/upgrade can throw it away. The Toolkit documentation covers persisting it; read that page before running the command, not after.

Sizing: the 1 GB minimum is optimistic under load

The application idles near the listed 1 GB across its containers, but LaTeX compilation is a CPU burst and a memory spike per user, and MongoDB and Redis want headroom. For a group of 5 to 10 writers I would give the host 2 CPU cores and 4 GB and expect compile times of 5 to 30 seconds for a typical paper, longer for a thesis with 200 figures. A single user on a 2 GB VPS will be fine. Ten students hitting recompile at once on that same VPS will not, and the failure mode is a compile that times out rather than a graceful queue.

Who should run this, and who should pay

Run Community Edition when the requirement is institutional: papers must stay on university hardware, or the group has outgrown the free tier's collaborator limit and does not want to pay per seat. Pay for Server Pro, or for overleaf.com, when track changes and comments are part of how the group works, because there is no plugin route to add them. For everyday collaborative writing that is not LaTeX, HedgeDoc and CryptPad are far lighter and both live in the office category. For a lone LaTeX user, code-server with a LaTeX extension and a local TeX Live is a smaller thing to run than the Overleaf stack, and it needs no Mongo.

What I'd do

For a lab or a course, I would run Community Edition through the Toolkit on a 4 GB VM, install the full TeX Live scheme once and persist it, close registration, put it behind the reverse proxy with TLS, and back up the MongoDB dump and the data directory nightly. I would tell the group up front that comments and track changes are not there so nobody discovers it mid-review. For anyone who needs those features, I would pay for the hosted service and spend the saved evenings writing.