Templates

Run the template gallery on a Kubernetes deployment.

The template gallery runs in the web service (the template-gallery module) of every Ayakaleaf Pro pod; the filestore service in the same pod stores the template files and renders their previews. Categories, permissions and publishing are described in Templates.

Services	web (template-gallery module), filestore (files and preview images)
Stored data	template metadata in MongoDB; ZIP, PDF and preview images in filestore’s template store: /var/lib/overleaf/data/template_files on the data volume, or the S3 bucket OVERLEAF_FILESTORE_TEMPLATE_FILES_BUCKET_NAME
Pod → outside	none (S3, if used)
Periodic jobs	none: previews are rendered the first time they are viewed

Configuration

1. ConfigMap

   30-config.yaml (additions)

     OVERLEAF_TEMPLATE_GALLERY: "true"
     ENABLE_CONVERSIONS: "true"
     OVERLEAF_TEMPLATE_CATEGORIES: academic-journal book presentation poster cv report thesis
     TEMPLATE_ACADEMIC_JOURNAL_NAME: Journal articles
     TEMPLATE_ACADEMIC_JOURNAL_DESCRIPTION: Templates for academic journal submissions.
     # ... one _NAME and _DESCRIPTION per category, see the Toolkit page
   
2. A templates user (optional)

   Admins can always publish. To let a non-admin user manage the gallery, create the user, read its ID from MongoDB and put it into the ConfigMap:

   kubectl -n overleaf exec mongo-0 -- mongosh --quiet \
     'mongodb://mongo-0.mongo:27017,mongo-1.mongo:27017,mongo-2.mongo:27017/sharelatex?replicaSet=overleaf' \
     --eval 'db.users.findOne({ email: "[e-mail]" })._id.toString()'
   

     OVERLEAF_TEMPLATES_USER_ID: "<the ID printed above>"
   
3. Apply and restart

   kubectl apply -f 30-config.yaml
   kubectl -n overleaf rollout restart deployment/overleaf     # or statefulset/overleaf
   

Several replicas

• The template files must be in S3: with files on each replica’s own disk, every node would show a different gallery. The Horizontal scaling setup already uses the bucket overleaf-template-files.
• Publishing takes the PDF of the project’s last compile, which exists only on the replica that compiled it. The load balancer’s sticky cookie keeps a user on that replica, so publish from the same browser session that compiled.

Tested on Kubernetes

On Kubernetes 1.37 with three replicas behind HAProxy and the template files in the S3 bucket overleaf-template-files (Garage), our end-to-end tests for the template gallery pass (41 cases): publishing a compiled project from the File menu and the PDF, preview images and source ZIP served from the bucket; creating projects from a template; categories, search, sorting and pages of the gallery; editing, overwriting and deleting templates; permissions of admins, regular users and the templates user from OVERLEAF_TEMPLATES_USER_ID (its ID read from MongoDB as described above); and malformed requests.