Introduction

Deploy Ayakaleaf Pro with guidance on migration, requirements, and LaTeX performance.

Like the Overleaf Server Pro, our Ayakaleaf Pro comes as a Docker container and is a direct drop-in replacement which additionally includes features such as SSO provided via LDAP and SAML2, improved security, tracked changes, comments, our optimized version of TeX Live, templates and administration panel.

• If you just want to test Ayakaleaf Pro’s features or try out the demo, you can follow our using-the-github-codespace.md tutorial. The demo environment uses a minimal TeX Live installation, so some of your projects may not compile successfully.
• If you have never deployed any version of Overleaf before, please refer to Setup Docker to install Docker Engine first, and then install Overleaf using-the-toolkit.
• If you have already deployed the Community Edition of Overleaf, please refer to migrate-from-existing.md to migrate to Ayakaleaf Pro.
• If you prefer using agents like Claude or Codex, you can refer to: using-claude-or-codex.md.
• If you need to deploy in an offline or air-gapped environment, please refer to: air-gapped-offline-deployments.md.
• If you are an existing Server Pro user, please open an issue to let us know before migrating to Ayakaleaf Pro, as the template data is stored in a slightly different format. We’d be very happy to help you migrate from Server Pro to Ayakaleaf Pro free of charge.
• Sometimes, if you ever get tired of our Ayakaleaf Pro and want to switch back to the official Overleaf Community Edition, that is fully supported. None of your data will be lost. For users of the official Overleaf Toolkit, simply remove your override YAML file. For users of the ayaka-notes toolkit, disable the SERVER_PRO option. Everything will then fall back to the standard Community Edition.

Please choose an installation method based on your needs:

Using GitHub Codespace

Using the Toolkit

Using Claude or Codex

Air-gapped/offline deployments

Migrate from Existing

Hardware requirements

We conducted relevant tests and found that, if you run Overleaf on a 2-core, 2 GB RAM server, its core components—primarily based on Node.js—will consume approximately 1 GB of memory. Redis and MongoDB may require an additional 0.5 GB, while starting a sandboxed Docker container for compilation can consume another 0.3 GB. This means that a 2-core, 2 GB server can realistically handle only about one concurrent compilation at a time.

• The minimum hardware requirements for installing Ayakaleaf Pro are a 2-core CPU and 3 GB of RAM.
• Due to the size of our TeX Live image, at least 40 GB of storage is required to enable sandboxed compilation.
• If you want to install the complete set of TeX Live images from 2020 through 2026, please make sure you have at least 150 GB of free disk space available.

Here are some recommended hardware configurations for different usage scenarios:

Use Case	Recommended Configuration
Personal use, with occasional collaboration	2 CPU cores, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB storage
Small teams, up to 10 users with light collaboration	2 CPU cores, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB storage
Medium-sized teams, up to 100 users	4 CPU cores, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB storage
Large-scale or university deployments	Distributed cluster deployment, with S3 storage; please contact us if you need deployment assistance

Software requirements

For software requirements, we recommend using a recent and stable version of Ubuntu (e.g. Ubuntu 24.04 in 2025–2026, Ubuntu 22.04 in 2023–2024) together with the latest stable version of Docker.

Stability comes first: choose the newest Ubuntu LTS that has been out for a while, not one that was just released. For example, as of October 2026, Ubuntu 26.04 is not supported: it ships with Linux kernel 7.0, and MongoDB refuses to start on Linux kernel 6.19 through 7.0.13 (details), so please use Ubuntu 24.04.

We do not recommend deploying Ayakaleaf Pro on Windows or other unsupported operating systems like CentOS, as you may encounter compatibility issues or unexpected problems during installation and operation.

But if you would like to try deploying Ayakaleaf Pro on ARM-based systems or macOS, we welcome you to share your experience and feedback with the community.

LaTeX Performance

LaTeX is a single threaded program, meaning it can only utilize one CPU core at a time. When compiling a single document, performance is primarily limited by the CPU’s single-core clock speed. Therefore the faster the single core performance of your CPU the faster you will be able to compile a document. More CPU cores are only beneficial when multiple users are compiling documents concurrently.

Using the ThuThesis template as an example, the compilation time is about 6 seconds on an Intel Core i9-14900K (5.6 GHz), while it takes about 13 seconds on an Azure Standard D2as v5 instance (2 vCPUs, 8 GiB RAM) powered by an AMD EPYC 7763 (3.2 GHz).

Of course, actual compilation performance depends on your hardware configuration. Most server CPUs do not run at such high clock speeds as 14900K, so you will need to make a trade-off between cost and compilation speed.

Meanwhile, we have also conducted an in-depth analysis of LaTeX compilation performance. If you are interested, please refer to our blog Overleaf Benchmark: A Deep Research of Concurrent LaTeX Compilation in Overleaf (SaaS and Self-host).