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What is the recommended way to keep my TeX Live installation up to date? Is there any package manager (like MiKTeX on Windows) that could help me with this?

If it helps I'm running on Mac OS X and my installation comes from MacTeX, but I guess solutions for other *nix systems might also be useful.

Joseph Wright
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Juan A. Navarro
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3 Answers3

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sudo tlmgr update --all

in your Terminal app.

MacTeX also comes with an extra application called "TeX Live Utility.app" which is a GUI version of tlmgr. (from Dash)

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fredz
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  • Excellent! I had no idea about this command, thank you very much! – Juan A. Navarro Aug 04 '10 at 11:17
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    I usually go for sudo tlmgr update --self --all so that tlmgr itself is updated first. – Joseph Wright Aug 04 '10 at 12:13
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    Does "tlmgr" update just TeX Live or does it update the full MacTeX distribution (which includes TeX Live + some Mac OS X specific GUI applications)? – Jukka Suomela Aug 04 '10 at 14:59
  • Is this better than leaving updating TeXLive to your package manager of choice (e.g. debian?) – Seamus Aug 04 '10 at 16:21
  • Most Linux distros don't include tlmgr, as the management is done by the distro. Whether this is right for you will depend on what you want. TeX Live itself is updated very frequently, while the distro versions tend to lag behind as they have different requirements. So if you want very up to date packages, do your own TeX Live install, but if you want the simplicity of distro management, then don't worry about it :-) – Joseph Wright Aug 04 '10 at 16:34
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    Ah. so if you're lazy like me, don't worry about it. great. – Seamus Aug 04 '10 at 16:48
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    @ Jukka: tlmgr only updates TeX Live components- i.e. packages and command line programs. – Sharpie Aug 04 '10 at 20:49
  • Hadn't updated Tex in at least a year, so this was a good thing to read! On update 28 of 699. – Kevin Vermeer Aug 05 '10 at 01:39
  • If you are on Debian stable, you might prefer tlmgr, if you are on unstable you will probably have decently new components through the package manager. – Caramdir Aug 05 '10 at 11:57
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If you have installed the full MacTeX, it comes with a extra application called "TeX Live Utility.app" which is a GUI version of tlmgr. In fact it looks very similar to Fink Commander and you can read the info pdf right there.

Dash
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    Actually with perl/tk installed, even on regular texlive you can run:

    tlmgr --gui

    to get a GUI version of tlmgr.

     – frabjous Aug 05 '10 at 01:51
  • perl/Tk is not installed by default on OS X- and getting it installed is a little bit of work. I had to export ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" before running cpan to install Tk otherwise it blew up when trying to build libpng as a universal binary. – Sharpie Aug 06 '10 at 00:06
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I agree with Joseph by including -self, but go a step further:

sudo tlmgr update -self -all -reinstall-forcibly-removed

(I had found that sometimes with TeX Live 2009, packages were “forcibly removed” even when I had given no command to do so, and needed this to get them back. I haven't had that issue so far with TeX Live 2010 testing, however.)

For awhile I used the texlive-full Debian/Ubuntu package, which doesn't include tlmgr, but got frustrated with the inability to upgrade packages as they were released.

doncherry
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frabjous
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