Compiling Latex documents using Github Action

GitHub Actions provides full access to the runner at your disposal, and one thing you may want to do is make commits in a workflow run and push it back up to GitHub automatically. I’m going to show a simple example where we run the date unix command, save the contents to a file, and push it back to the master branch. Example workflow

Using Makefile

Use make file to automate all the actions which needs to be done after checking out the repo.
Here is a Makefile for compiling latex file

filename=main

pdf:
    mkdir -p build
    pdflatex --output-directory build ${filename}
    bibtex build/${filename}||true
    pdflatex --output-directory build ${filename}
    pdflatex --output-directory build ${filename}
    mv build/${filename}.pdf .

read:
    evince build/${filename}.pdf &

clean:
    rm -f build/${filename}.{ps,pdf,log,aux,out,dvi,bbl,blg}

Installing latex commands in Github Action

Inorder to use pdflatex in the ubuntu machine generted for compilation first you need to install the necessary packages in the ubuntu machine .

Using git commit in GitHub Actions

The following is a workflow which on push will do the following:

checkout the repo
install latex dependency
run make command and compile
setup git config
commit the changed file and push it back to master

name: Makefile CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "master" ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "master" ]

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-extra
  
    - name: Compile
      run: make
      
    - name: setup git config
      run: |
        # setup the username and email. I tend to use 'GitHub Actions Bot' with no email by default
        git config user.name "GitHub Actions Bot"
        git config user.email "<>"

    - name: commit
      run: |
        # Stage the file, commit and push
        git add main.pdf
        git commit -m "new main pdf commit"
        git push origin master

[1] https://lannonbr.com/blog/2019-12-09-git-commit-in-actions/ [2] Example github page