Overleaf registration worker

Public user registration for a self-hosted Overleaf instance.

Why?

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.

How?

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.

Deployment

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.

Environment variables

The Docker container needs all the following environment variables to function properly:

Environment variable	Description
CAPTCHA_SERVER_KEY	reCAPTCHA v3 server key
CAPTCHA_CLIENT_KEY	reCAPTCHA v3 client key
OL_INSTANCE	Overleaf self-hosted instance (without trailing /)
OL_ADMIN_EMAIL	Overleaf administrator account email
OL_ADMIN_PASSWORD	Overleaf administrator account password