Reliable installation from CTAN mirrors inside Docker image

Question

I am trying to create a Docker image with texlive which is not >4G heavy like docker.io/texlive/texlive. Installing e.g. from Debian sources won't build, because once you want to add certain packages (e.g. tlmgr install cleveref) right now it only says:

tlmgr: Local TeX Live (2020) is older than remote repository (2021).

because CTAN mirrors have updated to 2021, but Debian has not.

So I am trying to install the recommended way using install-tl-unx.tar.gz, but this also keeps failing because no CTAN mirror can be reached. Here is a minimum example of the Dockerfile:

FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk add perl
RUN wget https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz; \
    tar -xzf install-tl-unx.tar.gz;
RUN cd install-tl-* ; \
    perl ./install-tl 

It fails stating that it cannot contact mirror.ctan.org, even though a second before it downloaded the installer from the very same site:

query_ctan_mirror: Programs not set up, trying wget
Loading http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
cannot contact mirror.ctan.org, returning a backbone server!

./install-tl: TLPDB::from_file could not initialize from: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb
./install-tl: Maybe the repository setting should be changed.
./install-tl: More info: https://tug.org/texlive/acquire.html

We can even force using that server and also force HTTPS with the --location argument:

RUN cd install-tl-*; \
    perl ./install-tl --location https://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet

Still the same, the server cannot be reached. I also tried other mirrors, which I tested to be available in my browser, none worked.

So I wonder what I need to do to have that installation run reliably, so that this can run inside a CI job.

Answer 1

For those who search for a way to install texlive from CTAN in a Docker container based on Alpine, check out this repository kjarosh/latex-docker.

The repo contains a Dockerfile that installs texlive in one of the desired schemes - minimal (~40MB), basic (~90MB), small (~180MB), medium (~500MB), full (~2GB). Already with basic scheme I was able to use pdflatex command to compile .tex source into a .pdf file.

To install additional packages use tlmgr install <packagename> or even install a list of packages from a text file by running tlmgr install `cat texpackages.txt`. Note the backquotes are important otherwise the command won't work.