Public user registration for a self-hosted Overleaf instance.
We are planning to offer a public Overleaf instance to our users (students and teachers), but the Community Edition does not support autonomous user registration: only the site administrator can create users via the admin panel.
This limitation is unacceptable for our use case, so we implemented it ourselves.
A simple form (available on /register path) is offered to the user asking for its email;
the application then logs into the Overleaf instance with the administrator account
and sends a request to create a user.
The user can now create an account by clicking the confirmation link on its mailbox.
There is a Docker image available on
ghcr.io/studentiunimi/overleaf-registration,
automatically built by GitHub Actions.
You can check the example docker-compose.yml file and tweak it with your configuration.
The Docker container needs all the following environment variables to function properly:
| Environment variable | Description |
|---|---|
CAPTCHA_SERVER_KEY |
reCAPTCHA v2 server key |
CAPTCHA_CLIENT_KEY |
reCAPTCHA v2 client key |
OL_INSTANCE |
Overleaf self-hosted instance (without trailing /) |
OL_ADMIN_EMAIL |
Overleaf administrator account email |
OL_ADMIN_PASSWORD |
Overleaf administrator account password |