tectonic -X build

Build the current document.

This is a V2 CLI command. For information on the original (”V1” CLI), see its reference page.

Usage Synopsis

tectonic -X build
  [--keep-intermediates] [-k]
  [--keep-logs]
  [--only-cached] [-C]
  [--open]
  [--print] [-p]
  [--target <target>]
  [--untrusted]

Remarks

This command builds the current document, as identified by searching for a Tectonic.toml file in the current directory or one of its parents. The build artifacts will be placed into the document’s build output directory, which defaults to a subdirectory build of the document source directory.

Command-Line Options

The --keep-intermediates option (or -k for short) will cause the engine to save intermediate files (such as mydoc.aux or mydoc.bbl) in the build output directory. By default, these files are stored in memory but not actually written to disk.

The --keep-logs option will cause the engine to save the main TeX log file (mydoc.log) to disk. By default, this information is discarded.

The --only-cached option (or -C for short) will configure the engine to refuse to connect to the network when searching for support files. This can be useful if you’re working on a document in a context where the Internet is unavailable (e.g., on an airplane). While the engine generally avoids unnecessary network connections, referencing a new file in your document will cause it to look for that file in the online support bundle.

The --open option will open the built document using the system handler.

The --print option (or -p for short) will cause the engine to print the regular terminal output of the TeX engine. This output is similar to, but not identical to, the contents of the log file. By default, this output is only printed if the engine encounters a fatal error.

The --target option will only build the output with the specified name. If this option is not given, all outputs will be built.

Use the --untrusted option if building untrusted content. This is not the default, because in most cases you will trust the document that you’re building, probably because you have created it yourself, and it would be very annoying to have to pass --trusted every time you build a document that uses shell-escape. See the security discussion in the documentation of the compile command for details. In actual usage, it would obviously be easy to forget to use this option; in cases where untrusted inputs are a genuine concern, we recommend setting the environment variable TECTONIC_UNTRUSTED_MODE to a non-empty value. This has the same effect as the --untrusted option. Note, however, that a hostile shell user can trivially clear this variable.