Three years ago, Cole Arendt
requested pre-built
TinyTeX binaries for ARM Linux. Today, I’m happy to announce that we now provide
pre-built TinyTeX binaries for arm64 and musl-based Linux (e.g. Alpine)
systems. On these platforms you no longer need to build TinyTeX from source;
binary installation will be much faster.
We also updated the release filename convention to include OS and architecture, so release assets are clearer and easier to work with.
The old pattern TinyTeX-<n>.[tar.gz|tgz|zip] is replaced by
TinyTeX-<n>-<OS>-<arch>.[xz|exe] (for example TinyTeX-1-linux-arm64.xz,
TinyTeX-2-darwin.xz, TinyTeX-0-windows.exe). Historically .tar.gz, .tgz,
and .zip were used for Linux, macOS, and Windows, respectively. Going forward,
we use .xz for Linux and macOS, and .exe for Windows (self-extracting
archives produced with 7z). This improves compression and makes asset names
more consistent.
I recommend using TinyTeX’s official installation
methods instead of downloading GitHub
release assets directly. The scripts and functions in these methods will
automatically detect arm64 and musl platforms and handle both old and new
filenames when downloading and installing TinyTeX.
For now, we plan to keep the old filenames in releases for two more years in case anyone still downloads them directly (not recommended).
Currently the new binaries and filename convention are available only in the
daily release.
Installing the daily release lets you use the new binaries now. They will be
included in the next monthly release on April 1 (no joking). Starting from
version 2026.04, the new binaries will be available in the monthly releases.
Quarto users: quarto install tinytex installs the monthly release, so it will
pick up the new binaries only after the next monthly release.
If you use the action r-lib/actions/setup-tinytex, no action is required (I
hope you are not confused by the two “actions” here): the action does not
hardcode asset filenames and uses the installer scripts. Running it on arm64
Ubuntu or an Alpine container will access the TinyTeX binaries automatically.
TeX Live (on which TinyTeX is based) supports several other platforms, including
amd64-freebsd, amd64-netbsd, armhf-linux, i386-freebsd, i386-linux,
i386-netbsd, i386-solaris, x86_64-cygwin, x86_64-darwinlegacy, and
x86_64-solaris. If you also need binaries for these platforms, please feel
free to not let me know. Oh dear, Solaris… How nostalgic… How much PTSD
for R package developers… No no no, thank you :)
