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Persistent Data Overview

The Overleaf Toolkit needs to store persistent data, such as the files required to compile LaTeX projects, and the contents of the MongoDB database. This is achieved by mounting a few directories from the host machine into the docker containers, and writing the data to those directories.

Data Directories

The Overleaf container requires a directory in which to store data relating to LaTeX compiles. This directory is set with the OVERLEAF_DATA_PATH variable in config/overleaf.rc.

The MongoDB container, if it is enabled, requires a directory in which to store it's database files, and the same is true of the Redis container. These directories can also be configured in config/overleaf.rc.

File Permissions

Because docker runs as root, the data directories will end up being owned by the root user, even if the toolkit is being used by a non-root user. This is not a problem, but is worth being aware of, if you intend to alter the persistent data from outside of the containers.

Backups

Documentation for creating a backup on data can be found in the Developer Wiki.

Volumes

If you're running Overleaf on Windows or macOS, the mongo service may fail to restart, with an error:

Failed to start up WiredTiger under any compatibility version.
Reason: 1: Operation not permitted

To avoid this error, the data needs to be stored in a volume rather than a bind mounted directory (see the mongo image documentation for more details). To store data inside Docker volumes mounted inside the MongoDB and Redis containers, add the following to config/docker-compose.override.yml (create this file if it doesn't exist yet):

volumes:
  mongo-data:
  redis-data:

services:
  mongo:
    volumes:
      - mongo-data:/data/db

  redis:
    volumes:
      - redis-data:/data

Moving the data directory

If you want to move the data directory of an existing deployment to a different location, run the following commands from the overleaf-tookit repository:

  1. bin/stop to stop the overleaf service
  2. bin/docker-compose rm mongo sharelatex redis to remove the containers
  3. adjust the paths in the config/overleaf.rc configuration file and move the data directory (or leave the relative paths and just move the entire overleaf-toolkit directory)
  4. bin/init and bin/start to start the overleaf service again

Note: Step 2 is required, since the old mount path of the data directory is stored in the stopped containers and will not update when they are restarted.