2022-05-19

Hosting a LaTeX Resume using GitHub

TL;DR: Use Overleaf to push to GitHub repo, GitHub Actions to compile, Embed a link to GitHub Pages wherever you need the PDF.

Initial setup using Netlify

For a few years, I’ve been using Overleaf to write my resume. My resume is also a file on my website. However, when I wanted to update it, my workflow looked like this:

1. Change the tex file
2. Compile the PDF
3. Download the PDF
4. Upload the PDF to the server hosting my website

I often forgot that I needed to update the file on the server, resulting in an outdated copy of my resume on my website. It’s worse if I made a small change and then realized I wanted to change it again!

More recently, I overhauled my site. It’s now hosted on Netlify. But now, every time I wanted to update my resume, I had to add a new commit just saying “Update resume.” How ugly!

So instead, I linked my Overleaf to GitHub and started pushing my changes there. Using GitHub Actions, you can automatically build your resume and upload the result as a release.

However, that came with a big problem: you could only download the PDF, not view it inline. This is due to GitHub sending the Content-Disposition: attachment header in the response. As far as I know, you shouldn’t be able to bypass this for security reasons (e.g. uploaded HTML files shown inline could lead to cross-site scripting attacks).

To get around this, I made a simple Netlify function that fetched the release and re-served it as a base64 blob, but without forcing it to be an attachment. This still felt janky - since I’m not downloading the PDF myself, I don’t get a nice progress bar.

Solution using GitHub Actions + Pages

Finally, I had some time to work on this, and I settled with this solution.

Instead of using GitHub Actions to create a release, I can use it to push the file to a separate branch of the repository called build. Then, I can use GitHub Pages to host the build branch, letting me view the built PDF.

The final GitHub Actions workflow looks like this:

name: build

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]

  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  build:
    name: Build and commit the PDF
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Compile resume
        uses: xu-cheng/latex-action@v2
        with:
          root_file: main.tex

      - name: View logs
        run: cat main.log

      - name: Move PDF
        run: |
          mkdir build
          mv main.pdf 'build/Kevin Wu Resume.pdf'

      - name: Push build
        uses: s0/git-publish-subdir-action@develop
        env:
          REPO: self
          BRANCH: build
          FOLDER: build
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          MESSAGE: "Build: ({sha}) {msg}"

And in the settings of the repository:

The final result can be viewed at https://github.com/Exaphis/resume.

GitHub Pages hosting my resume: https://exaphis.github.io/resume/Kevin%20Wu%20Resume.pdf

Final notes

In the response headers, GitHub Pages sets the cache control max age to 600 seconds. This means that after updating the PDF in the repo, it might take up to 10 minutes for users who have previously viewed the PDF to see the new version. This was fine for me, so I didn’t bother investigating ways to get around this.