Installing *just* TeX

Question

For a project, I intend to use TeX as a “backend” to layout and generate PDF, i. e., my program would emit core-TeX code to be immediately compiled. I think that means I just need pdftex or xetex + dvipdf and their minimal dependencies.
TeXLive, however, does not seem to account for such a use-case; even a minimal installation as described in a previous question contains tex, pdftex, luatex, bibtex, various dvi drivers, and some other things that I don’t think are all strictly necessary.
Is it possible to achieve my goal without having to manually prune such an installation?
Thanks for your help!

Davislor · Answer

Since you specify Linux, the most minimal package available for Debian/Ubuntu is texlive-base, which comes in at nearly 75 MB.  If you don’t use an apt or rpm package, you would need to install tlmgr or another package manager to keep it updated.
It includes pdftex, biblatex, luatex (which you need to use texlua, e.g. for the getnonfreefonts installer to work), metafont, some fonts, color profiles, and glyph data.
Is there a practical need for the smallest installation possible?  Even USB flash drives have dozens of gigabytes of space.

Joseph Wright · Answer

The absolute minimal TeX Live installation is scheme-infraonly, which really means it: you don't get anything beyond that necessary to allow tlmgr to run. You can then add packages one at a time: this needs a bit of experimentation even with an ultra-small set of requirements.
As you almost certainly want to avoid sources and documenation, you likely want a profile file saying
selected_scheme scheme-infraonly
option_doc 0
option_src 0

to be installed using
./install-tl --profile=texlive.profile

(using whatever name you've given the file).
The resulting installation is about 3.0 Mb according to du -sh. Adding pdfTeX using tlmgr install pdftex, which pulls in things like the Computer Modern fonts, etc., takes it to 25 Mb.

Installing just TeX

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