Auto Package download for TeXLive

My rather simplistic approach was to search for usepackage, extract the contents and install using the distribution's package manager.

cat *.tex | sed -n 's/^[^%]*usepackage[^{]*{([^}]*)}.*$/tex(1.sty)/p' | paste -sd ' ' -

This returns a list of packages with .sty and surrounded by tex(), e.g. tex(amsmath.sty) tex(enumitem.sty) tex(graphicx.sty). I can pass these straight to yum/dnf (I'm using Fedora).

sudo dnf install $( cat *.tex | sed -n 's/^[^%]*usepackage[^{]*{([^}]*)}.*$/tex(1.sty)/p' | paste -sd ' ' - )

There were a couple of packages I had split over multiple lines that the sed expression missed, which I installed manually using sudo dnf install 'tex(some-package-name.sty)'.

Hopefully there's a simple .sty installing equivalent for apt-get on ubuntu.

There is no such functionality builtin as mentioned. However, with some botching one can create a small wrapper that does exactly that.

Simply scanning the packages is often not enough because you don't get the dependencies.

itex uses expect to catch errors and install the packages on the fly.

https://github.com/dopefishh/itex

With itex you only need to install the texlive infrastructure and the script will install the rest.

texliveonfly

As mentioned in comments, there is a TeX Live package called texliveonfly which you can use with texliveonfly filename.tex, and it will automatically downloaded the right TeX Live packages.

This also works for packages for which the LaTeX package name and the TeX Live package name don't match (for example the LaTeX rubikrotation package is contained in the rubik TeX Live package), and it also takes package dependencies into account.

Usage

Installing It is a Python script so it requires Python to be installed. You can then install it like usually with tlmgr install texliveonfly. If you have to use sudo tlmgr here, you will have to use sudo texliveonfly later.

Running If you go in your terminal to the directory of your filename.tex file, you can run it with texliveonfly filename.tex.

Other compilers At the moment it uses pdflatex by default, but you can configure it to run with other compiler engines by using the --compiler (or -c) flag, so like texliveonfly --compiler=lualatex filename.tex.

Compiler flags You can pass flags for the compiler you use to texliveonfly using the --arguments (or -a) flag, so for example if you previously used latexmk -shell-escape -pdf filename.tex then you now use texliveonfly --compiler=latexmk --arguments='-shell-escape -pdf' filename.tex.

Known problems

1. There are some cases of missing packages which fail with a non-standard error message, for example babel when it's missing languages, in which case texliveonfly doesn't download them. At the moment the following packages are known to have to be installed manually: (please edit if you find more)

• Babel languages, for example for european languages install the collection-langeuropean package
• Biblatex styles, e.g. for the nature style you need the biblatex-nature package
• fontenc encodings, e.g. to get t2aenc.def you need the cyrillic package, and to get the ly1enc.def you need the ly1 package.
• Packages involved when using the minted package, which are minted fvextra upquote lineno xstring framed caption (thanks to pablgonz for testing)
• When running external programs like texcount in your LaTeX file, texliveonfly does not detect that you need the texcount package.

2. When giving options to texliveonfly, for example for a different compiler, it sometimes hangs for no apparent reason when installing packages. You can most probably work around it by first running texliveonfly without options, so texliveonfly main.tex (so it will download the packages) and then running whatever you wanted to, for example latexmk main.tex.

Background

Essentially texliveonfly is a build tool like latexmk (which is a Perl script), it wraps the TeX engine. Note however that you can chain them with texliveonfly --compiler=latexmk filename.tex.

It is a python script which works by trying to run your LaTeX file, and if it fails because a package is missing it will try to install that package.

Besides on ctan.org/pkg/texliveonfly you can view the source at ctan.org/tex-archive/support/texliveonfly or on latex.org/forum

PS I tested this on Arch Linux 4.19.4 and on Travis CI (Ubuntu 14.04).