My Resume Workflow

09 Apr 2020

· 3 min read

I have been writing and compiling my resume on Overleaf, and hosting the project on GitHub. Just to give you a bit of its background, Overleaf is something like Google Docs for \(\LaTeX\). It provides a \(\LaTeX\) environment in your browser, and you can collaborate on the same document with other users.

Overleaf is good for creating \(\LaTeX\) documents, but I want to have my resume readily available on the Internet, and ideally, whenever I make changes to the \(\TeX\) file, a compiled version of the document will be uploaded to a file hosting site. Now Overleaf and even other \(\TeX\) distributions are not all-purpose – the only things you can do in the Overleaf are: export the project as PDF, or sync the project with Dropbox, Git or GitHub.

One way I could think of, is to trigger a build whenever I push changes to/tag a commit in the GitHub repo, and automagically upload the artifacts to GitHub. Free file hosting, great! To do so, let’s create a GitHub Actions workflow in a repo that contains a .tex file, which will:

Compiles the \(\TeX\) source file into PDF
Create a release on GitHub
Upload the PDF as a part of the release

name: CI

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'

jobs:
  build_latex:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Code
        uses: actions/checkout@master
      - name: Compile LaTex Resume
        uses: xu-cheng/latex-action@master
        with:
          root_file: resume.tex
      - name: Create Release
        id: create_release
        uses: actions/create-release@master
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          tag_name: ${{ github.ref }}
          release_name: Release ${{ github.ref }}
          draft: false
          prerelease: false
      - name: Upload Release Asset
        id: upload-release-asset 
        uses: actions/upload-release-asset@master
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          upload_url: ${{ steps.create_release.outputs.upload_url }}
          asset_path: ./resume.pdf
          asset_name: resume.pdf
          asset_content_type: application/pdf

I added a condition:

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*'

so that it only creates a release when I tag a commit. Voilà! The PDF should then be available at https://github.com/user/repo_name/releases/latest/download/resume.pdf. I have made my resume repo a “template” so that you can use the same workflow (or you can copy & paste the file ). This method does not only work for Overleaf, it works for any \(\TeX\) distributions!

Thanks for reading my first blog post! It’s been quite some time since I started making this site¹. Really enjoyed building this site from scratch, and hopefully I will keep updating the blog.

First commit was on Jun 26, 2018, lol ↩