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I'm trying to get pdflatex working on AWS Lambda and I've hit a roadblock. I believe I have the basic tex engine running as I'm able to run the command pdflatex -version and get the correct information.

However, when I try to compile an actual latex file (pdflatex sample.tex) I get the following error:

   kpathsea: Running mktexfmt pdflatex.fmt
   mktexfmt: No such file or directory

Due to the ephemeral nature of AWS Lambda I created a new bin/ folder, added it to the $PATH and included in it all of the required dependencies as well as rebuild the ls-R file at the root of the directory. The ls-R file contains the location of pdflatex.fmt but my guess is that it's not searching the correct directory for the ls-R file. The kpathsea documentation states you can set the default installation location in $TEXMF but that doesn't seem to have worked.

$ echo $TEXMF
/var/task/bin # the created bin directory

Any ideas on how to continue debugging this installation? Or if there's a better approach at this.

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    Welcome! So does kpswhich pdflatex.fmt return nothing? What have you set TEXMF to? Do you mean that you have ls-R, bin/? Do you not have texmf.cnf somewhere? I guess ... how familiar are you with TeX Live in other contexts?
    – cfr
    Jan 17, 2017 at 2:52
  • @cfr thanks for the help! I do not have the command kpswhich (I installed the texlive-scheme-basic if that changes anything). I don't have much familiarity with TeX Live in general other than the reading that I've been doing in the past couple of days (if you have any useful links I appreciate it). I realized that I hadn't modified the contents of texmf.cnf to match the Lambda environment but that didn't change anything. I've updated the original question with the value of $TEXMF. I'm not sure I get your question about ls-R and bin/.
    – dmlittle
    Jan 17, 2017 at 3:22
  • I can't imagine the basic schema does not include kpsewhich. At least, that's surprising. kpsewhichis part of the kpathsea TeX Live package. It is part of collection-basic and classified as TLCore.
    – cfr
    Jan 17, 2017 at 4:07
  • Do you have mktexfmt? That looks to be missing too? You seem to be missing essential binaries or they are not found in your PATH.
    – cfr
    Jan 17, 2017 at 4:16
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    It looks like they tried to use kpswhich, but that is a typo. It should be kpsewhich
    – Flurrywinde
    Jul 12, 2021 at 16:09

1 Answer 1

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The error is even before finding the latex.fmt file.

   mktexfmt: No such file or directory

Here, the engine is complaining that it cannot find the mktexfmt binary. I ran into this issue as well, and after spending some time trying to find the [xe]latex.fmt file, I tried to obtain the mktexfmt binary.

  1. Open up tlmgr -gui, and in the "Match" textbox, input mktexfmt. This will display one or two packages, named texlive-scripts.
  2. Select all that you see at the end of this search, and install. I would guess that using the CLI, you could alternatively do tlmgr install texlive-scripts.

At the end of this, the LaTeX engine stopped complaining about not finding mktexfmt, so I imagine it is supplied by the texlive-scripts package.

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  • Fixed this on my Arch installation by installing the texlive-core package from extra.
    – Waldir Leoncio
    Feb 14, 2022 at 6:28

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