For the impatient and tech-savvy: go and check out this GitHub template repository.

Last week during the Stacks project workshop I gave an introduction to Git for working mathematicians, and one thing that people found interesting then was my GitHub LaTeX template, which includes:

  • a GitHub Action to build pdf's upon push, see pdf.yml
  • hooks to add commit metadata to pdf's

The first thing is the coolest I think, and a variation upon existing such actions that are available on GitHub already. It guarantees that there is always a copy of the pdf in the repository, except that it lives in an orphan branch where it cannot create conflicts!

I've now put this on GitHub as a template repository, so that you can just click the green Use this template button to start a new repository from scratch, with this configuration.

Is there something missing, or unclear? Let me know!

I also have some inspiration to write a "Git and GitHub for working mathematicians" tutorial, there exist excellent introductions already, but I think there needs to be one which doesn't mention the commandline at all. Stay tuned for that!