I am marking this answer as community-wiki.
Version 3.0a
is know to be shipped with TeX Live and MiKTeX, so if you have either of those TeX distributions, it is almost certain that you already have arara
in your system path. :)
A quick glance in the terminal:
[paulo@cambridge ~] $ arara -v
__ _ _ __ __ _ _ __ __ _
/ _` | '__/ _` | '__/ _` |
| (_| | | | (_| | | | (_| |
\__,_|_| \__,_|_| \__,_|
arara 3.0a - The cool TeX automation tool
Copyright (c) 2012, Paulo Roberto Massa Cereda
All rights reserved.
...
So far, so good. :)
arara
is also shipped with several predefined rules. They are listed in the current user manual (accessible through CTAN or by issuing texdoc arara
in the terminal). Here they are in a TeX Live installation:
[paulo@cambridge rules] $ pwd
/usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/scripts/arara/rules
[paulo@cambridge rules] $ ls
biber.yaml lmkclean.yaml make.yaml sketch.yaml
bibtex.yaml lualatexmk.yaml nomencl.yaml songidx.yaml
clean.yaml lualatex.yaml pdflatexmk.yaml tex.yaml
dvips.yaml luatex.yaml pdflatex.yaml xelatexmk.yaml
frontespizio.yaml makeglossaries.yaml pdftex.yaml xelatex.yaml
latex.yaml makeindex.yaml ps2pdf.yaml xetex.yaml
So, unless you want to define a custom rule for arara
, there is absolutely no need to have a configuration file. :)
Everything will already work out of the box. For example, consider mydoc.tex
:
% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello world.
\end{document}
If you run arara mydoc.tex
, the compilation will happen as expected:
[paulo@cambridge ~] $ arara mydoc.tex
__ _ _ __ __ _ _ __ __ _
/ _` | '__/ _` | '__/ _` |
| (_| | | | (_| | | | (_| |
\__,_|_| \__,_|_| \__,_|
Running PDFLaTeX... SUCCESS
To run arara
through TeXworks, we need to configure the editor first. :)
Here we go!
The following steps are described in the current user manual, so I took the liberty of reproducing it here as well, for completeness sake.
- First, click in Edit → Preferences... to open the preferences
screen:

- The next screen is the TeXworks preferences. There are several tabs available. Navigate to the Typesetting tab, which contains two lists: the paths for TeX and related programs, and the processing tools. In the second list - the processing tools - click the Plus (+) button to add another tool.

- TeXworks provides a very straightforward interface for adding new tools; we just need to provide the tool name, the executable path, and the parameters.

Important note: When I wrote the manual, arara
was not yet distributed with TeX Live or MiKTeX, hence the figure displays a different path. It is advisable for you to select the arara
executable from the bin
folder in your TeX Live installation. Sadly, I don't have a Windows machine to point you to the exact location, so I kindly ask our friends here to help me on this regard. :)
Here we have the parameters:

Now it is just a matter of confirming the inclusion of arara
in the list of tools in your TeXworks session. :)
Then arara
will be listed as a compilation profile:

Now, let me go back and talk about configuration files for version 3.0a
. Since I am a Linux user, it took me a while to understand why the tool had raised that specific error. The reason is, surprisingly, the existence of :
, which in the YAML format, represents a map separator (hence the error). The solution would be quoting the entry either with single or double quotes:
!config
paths:
- 'C:/Program Files/arara'
And I believe this particular issue regarding configuration files is solved. Now, back to the rules residing in the project's official repository at GitHub. :)
For a while, I've been working on a brand new version of arara
to be released in this year, hopefully. New enhancements, bug fixes and much more were added to this new release, and the rule format had to be updated. Given that this was my first project with a lot of visibility, I had not much experience in organising things, so there was no warning sign telling users of version 3.0a
of arara
to not rely on those rules by the sheer fact that they were for the upcoming version and no backwards-compatible. So I kindly apologize for the confusion.
There is no need to rely on those rules because the current distribution of arara
already covers most of them. Hopefully, the new version will be released in the next months and all confusion regarding versioning will be over. And other issues will arise, eventually. :)
So that's it, I hope my humble notes can help you. :)
Please, let me know if you need any clarification, I'd be more than glad to help you!
:)
arara
? I am asking because the rules at the repository are for a newer version ofarara
, so I need to know howarara
is available in your system. Perhaps TeX Live?