I'm writing a paper in RMarkdown and for better reproducibility, I want to containerize all required software in a singularity container. Unfortunately, when I try to install TinyTeX (which is recommended for Rmarkdown and I would prefer over TeXLive to not inflate the container more than needed), it fails with the following error message (the full build log is pasted here):
Can't locate TeXLive/TLConfig.pm in @INC (you may need to install the TeXLive::TLConfig module) (@INC contains: /~/.TinyTeX/texmf-dist/scripts/texlive /~/.TinyTeX/tlpkg /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.26.1 /usr/local/share/perl/5.26.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.26 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl/5.26 /usr/share/perl/5.26 /usr/local/lib/site_perl /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl-base) at ~/.TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr line 100.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ~/.TinyTeX/bin/x86_64-linux/tlmgr line 100.
This is the build definition file, basically it uses a very slimmed down ubuntu 18.04 and then executes the %post section to install software
BootStrap: library
From: ubuntu:18.04
%post
# Add universe repository
echo "deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic universe" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt -y update
# Install utilites
apt install -y wget
# Install R
apt install -y r-base-core
## Install RMarkdown and TinyTeX
R --slave -e 'install.packages(c("rmarkdown","tinytex")); tinytex::install_tinytex()'
# Clean
apt-get clean
%environment
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
%labels
Author DP
I have also tried tinytex::install_tinytex(dir="/opt/tinytex") but that didn't seem to change anything. Does anyone have an idea what's wrong?
That error message is complaining that your image (or, more likely, your path) is missing the TeXLive::TLConfig perl module.
My guess is that the path contents are not being rehashed with the installed modules after the install. The simplest solution is to break it into two commands:
R --slave -e 'install.packages(c("rmarkdown","tinytex"))'
R --slave -e 'tinytex::install_tinytex()'
Installation succeeds when I try that locally.