Building a Latex resume and not worrying about compiling it

Feb 03, 2018

A long time ago I came accross Adrian Friggeri’s resume built with Latex. I couldn’t find the original template, but did found this page with a customization.

I found that template amazing and I decided I wanted my resume to be like that. I was looking for a new job, so why not? That being said, I spent hours and hours on it; I installed uncountable dependencies, made some Helvetica fonts work on my Linux box, created the perfect descriptions for my previous positions, adjusted the alignments with so much care. Phew, I finally managed to have my fancy curriculum!

Eventually I got a new job and forgot about it, until I decided to update it. At that point I had a clean OS installation, so I’d have to install all those dependencies again. As a result, I decided to ditch that resume and build a simpler one, based on the well-known moderncv template. This one was simpler to compile as it required fewer dependencies so I thought my problem was soved.

However, recently I decided to update it, and guess what? For some reason it didn’t compile. Then I realized that the building process of my resume would be a great candidate to be containerized. To make things better, I found out that there is a moderncv package available in Fedora 27. So I quickly put together this simple Dockerfile in my resume directory:

FROM fedora-minimal:27

VOLUME /data

WORKDIR /data

RUN microdnf update && \
    microdnf install texlive texlive-xetex texlive-moderncv && \
    microdnf clean all

Voilà! Build the image, push it to Docker Hub and you will never have install texlive and its dependencies only to compile your resume again.

If you are interested you can check my GitHub repository for a complete example.