arara is a TeX automation tool based on rules and directives. It gives you subsidies to enhance your TeX experience. The tool is an effort to provide a concise way to automate the daily TeX workflow for users and also package writers. Users might write their own rules when the provided ones do not suffice.
To use arara, you need to tell it what to do. Unlike most other tools, you give arara these 'directives' in the document itself – usually near the top. So to run pdflatex once on your document, you should say something like:
% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, world!
\end{document}Now when you run arara my-file, that directive (% arara: ...) will be seen and carried out as described by the pdflatex rule. You can read more about rules and directives in the manual. In addition to documenting all of the rules that come standard with arara, its manual gives a detailed explanation of how arara works, how to create and use your own rules, and how to integrate the tool into the common TeX IDEs.
The arara team is working on the new 4.0 version. The code is ready and we are now focusing on rules, translations and the documentation itself. It might take a while since a lot of things have changed since version 3.0, so the manual has to be completely rewritten. Hopefully, we will release it soon. :)
- Current TL version: 3.0 (codebase is available in the releases section)
- Development/upcoming version: 4.0 (the repository itself holds the last changes)
arara uses Travis CI as a hosted continuous integration service. For each and every commit, we can see in real time the build status of our application checked against the following Java VM vendors:
- OpenJDK 6.0
- OpenJDK 7.0
- Oracle Java 7.0
- Oracle Java 8.0
More JVM's might be added soon. It is worth noting that arara is designed and built to be Java 5.0 compliant, so if you have an old JVM, it is almost sure that you will be able to run our beloved tool in it without any problems.
Current build status:
We use a Gitter chatroom for discussing things related to arara. You are more than welcome to come join the fun and say hi! to us. We also have the issues section in our repository as a valid channel to report problems, bugs and suggest improvements.
Our Gitter chatroom:
Would you like to make arara speak your own language? Splendid! We would love to have you in the team! Just send us an e-mail, join our dedicated chatroom or open an issue about it. The localization process is quite straightforward, we can help you! :) Any language is welcome!
Binary releases are powered by Bintray and not available in the repository anymore. You can click here or use the button below to get access to the current 3.0 release. Note that you need Java to run both the installer and arara itself.
Download:
If you want to try out the development version, you need to build it from source. It is actually a straightforward process: just clone this repository, go to the application/ directory and run mvn assembly:assembly (you need Apache Maven for this); you'll get the resulting .jar file in a target/ directory. Have fun!
This application is licensed under the New BSD License.Please note that the New BSD License has been verified as a GPL-compatible free software license by the Free Software Foundation, and has been vetted as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative.
Paulo Roberto Massa Cereda
Marco Daniel
Brent Longborough
No ducks were hurt in the making of this tool