Updating TexLive on Ubuntu

17 Jun 2020

This post is intended to help you install the latest version of TeXLive (including pdflatex, xelatex, and many other things). If you haven’t installed TexLive on your system yet, please jump directly to Step 4. These instructions should also work on Mac, but I have tested them only on an Ubuntu system.

Of course, TexLive can be installed from Ubuntu’s software repository. While that method is easier and probably more polular, it never gives you the latest version of Tex and other related software. Therefore, it’s not at all an option for updating to the latest version.

Let’s get started now.

1. Find out the latest version of TexLive available for installation
   Go to this page and check for the information on latest version. Currently, it is TexLive 2020.

2. Find your installed version
   Open a terminal, and run this command:

   tex --version
   

   This command will print many lines, but information we want is in the very first line. If the year is less than 2020, it’s probably a good idea to update.

3. Removing the installed version of TeXLive
   Before installing the latest version of TexLive, it’s better to remove the version you already have. To remove TexLive completely, run the following commands, one after the other, in a Terminal.

   sudo apt-get purge texlive*
   sudo rm -rf /usr/local/texlive/*
   rm -rf ~/.texlive*
   sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/texmf
   sudo rm -rf /var/lib/texmf
   sudo rm -rf /etc/texmf
   sudo apt-get remove tex-common --purge
   rm -rf ~/.texlive
   

4. Installing TexLive
   

   • Download the .tar.gz file from the link given here.

   • Extract the contents of the file to a suitable location. After extraction you should see a directory with a name similar to install-tl-20200615. Inside this directory, among other things, there is a file by name install-tl.

   • Open a Terminal, navigate to the aforementioned directory, and run the following command.

     perl install-tl
     

     This starts the installation process which goes on for a long time (A little more than an hour on my laptop).

5. Updating the PATH variable
   After all the packages are installed, we have update the PATH variable with the installation location of the files. This is just a way of telling the computer about the location of executable files related to *TeX. Therefore, whenever we use *TeX commands, the computer knows where to look for the right files.

   • To update the PATH variable, run the following command in the Terminal.

       gedit ~/.bashrc
     

     This opens a text editor window. Here we are just editing a text file, and you can use any text editor (I generally use GVim).

   Add the following lines to the /.bashrc file.

     # TexLive
     export PATH="/usr/local/texlive/2020/bin/x86_64-linux:$PATH"
     export MANPATH="/usr/bin/local/texlive/2020/texmf-dist/doc/man:$MANPATH"
     export INFOPATH="/usr/bin/local/texlive/2020/texmf-dist/doc/info:$INFOPATH"
   

   • Save and close the file, and run the follwoing command in the terminal.

     source ~/.bashrc	#Execute ~/.bashrc in the current shell
     hash -r
     which tex
     which xelatex
     which pdflatex
   

   The last three commans should print out the path to different programmes which you might use.

   Your TexLive installation is complete now.

References

1. StackOverflow
2. Tex User Group