Ayakaleaf Pro: Overleaf Community Edition with the paid features added back

An Overleaf fork with the commercial feature list filled in

The project describes itself as an enhanced version of Overleaf with almost all features and capabilities, an Overleaf Community Edition with all the Pro features, open source, free to use and self-hostable. The repository description is blunter still, calling it a free, self-hosted, drop-in replacement for Overleaf Community Edition with nearly all Pro features, and noting that it was formerly known as Overleaf Pro before the rename. The scale of what is being added is best seen in the feature list, and it is a long one. There is two-way Dropbox sync, a two-way GitHub Enterprise sync and a two-way GitLab sync, Git-Bridge support for cloning, pulling and pushing with Git, an MCP server so AI agents can edit, compile and comment, an AI chat assistant, an error assistant that explains and fixes compile errors, Pandoc import and export for Word, Markdown and LaTeX, a Python script runner, Zotero and Mendeley integration with OAuth support, advanced reference search, track changes with a review and comment panel, full project history with restore and download, a symbol palette, a template system with a gallery, an admin panel for global user and project management, and SSO with LDAP, SAML or OAuth 2.0.

Sandboxed compilation and the two compose services

The compose file at the repository root is the clearest picture of the base stack, and it is a fairly conventional Overleaf deployment. The application service is named sharelatex and runs from the sharelatex/sharelatex image, with a comment showing the Server Pro image as an alternative for those who have it. It waits for Mongo to report healthy and for Redis to have started before it comes up, publishes port 80, and keeps its data in a volume mounted at /var/lib/overleaf. The Mongo URL and the Redis host are both set, with a comment noting that the same property unfortunately has different names in different locations, so both are set. The environment also enables linked file types, turns on conversions for thumbnail generation, and disables email confirmation:

    environment:
      OVERLEAF_APP_NAME: Overleaf Community Edition

      OVERLEAF_MONGO_URL: mongodb://mongo/sharelatex

      # Same property, unfortunately with different names in
      # different locations
      OVERLEAF_REDIS_HOST: redis
      REDIS_HOST: redis

There is a commented line for an invite token secret marked as required for invite token generation, and a commented line for mounting the Docker socket, which the comment says is required for sibling containers to work, so the same stack can compile one project that references another. The stop grace period is 60 seconds, which is there so in-flight compiles are not killed on shutdown.

The TeX Live image is a separate project, and it is the heavy part

Sandbox compile with texlive-full image support is listed as a feature, and the TeX Live image is not part of this repository. It lives in a separate ayaka-notes/texlive-full project, linked from the header, and the project also publishes its own Docker image to a container registry under the overleaf-pro package name. That separation is worth understanding, because compiling LaTeX is the expensive part of running an Overleaf-compatible service and it is where most of the disk and memory go. A basic Overleaf container compiles against a modest TeX installation; a full one is a different order of magnitude. The project also maintains a Toolkit repository that it strongly recommends for installation, and a playground repository that provides a preconfigured GitHub Codespaces environment so you can launch and explore the product in a browser without setting up a server at all. That playground is the sensible first step for anyone evaluating this, and the README points at it before it points at production installation.

Getting it running, and the two ways to try it

There are two paths, and the README is explicit about which to use when. If you just want to try Ayakaleaf Pro without setting up a server, the Ayakaleaf Pro Playground provides a preconfigured GitHub Codespaces environment that lets you launch and explore Ayakaleaf Pro directly in the browser, opened through a Codespaces badge. If you want to deploy it for production use, the detailed installation instructions are on the documents page, and the project highly recommends installing it with the ayaka-notes Toolkit. The README does not explain the reasoning, so treat the Toolkit as the documented installation path rather than a hand-built setup. The upgrade path is documented separately, with the releases page describing the changes in each version between your current version and the one you are upgrading to, which matters because this is a fork of a fast moving upstream.

Registration control and the admin panel

Two features are about running the service for other people rather than for yourself. Self Register is optional and can be limited by mail domain, so an institution can open the service to its own staff and not to the world. Unlimited Compile Times is adjustable in the admin panel, which is the feature that most directly targets the difference between the free and paid tiers, since compilation limits are what a busy department hits first. The Admin Panel covers global users and projects management. In the compose file, the application name is set to Overleaf Community Edition and the site URL, navigation title and header image settings are present but commented out, with the note that they are set for SSL via nginx-proxy, which tells you the intended production topology has a reverse proxy in front of the container.

A yarn workspace on Node 24, with the Overleaf tree intact

The repository layout is the Overleaf tree with the Pro work on top, and the build configuration is modern. The root package is named overleaf and is private, with yarn 4.18.0 as the package manager, and the engines field requires Node 24.18.1 or newer, which is a very recent floor. The top level directories are the ones you would expect from the upstream project, with server-ce, services, libraries, tools, develop, bin and doc, plus a .devcontainer directory and a .pnp.register.mjs file, which is the Plug'n'Play manifest indicating the project runs yarn in Plug'n'Play mode with a .yarn directory and a yarnrc.yml at the root. The toolchain is TypeScript with two tsconfig files, one for the backend, and the test tooling is a mix of mocha, chai, cypress and vitest with the corresponding eslint plugins, so the older test suites and the newer ones coexist. There is also a docker-compose.debug.yml beside the main one, which is how you run the stack against your working copy.

Translations, licensing and the affiliation disclaimer

The translations arrangement is a small but revealing detail. The project welcomes contributions to translations of Ayakaleaf Pro, and says it generally uses claude/codex to translate the English text into other languages, with corrections sent as pull requests. The constraint is precise: only files in the services/web/locales/locales_patches folder may be modified, because the files under services/web/locales are the official Overleaf translation files and must not be touched directly. That is a patch model over an upstream directory, which is the only workable approach for a fork. The licence is the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with the copyright lines split between the Overleaf Team for 2014 to 2025 and the Pro authors from 2026 onwards. The README also carries a note that the project is not affiliated with Overleaf, Inc. or its parent company Digital Science, and that it is not Server Pro Edition, which is a commercial product offered by Overleaf, Inc.

ARM support, releases, and where the project is going

The last features worth noting are operational. ARM support is listed for x86_64 and arm64 on Docker, which matters because the Apple Silicon and Graviton machines that people actually run are not x86. The recent release tags show steady work: Ayakaleaf Pro v6.3.1 on 2026-10-18, v6.3.0 on 2026-09-24 and v6.2.2 on 2026-07-23, with the last push to the repository on 2026-10-20, the same day. The project also writes a blog about Overleaf internals, compilation performance and self-hosted LaTeX infrastructure, with two recent posts specifically about the Overleaf Server Pro price and about a benchmark of concurrent LaTeX compilation in Overleaf, which is the kind of thing you would only write if you had run the comparison yourself. The default branch is server-pro, which tells you the Pro work is the main line rather than a side branch.

Editorial conclusion

Ayakaleaf Pro suits a university, a lab or a company that wants an Overleaf-compatible LaTeX editor it runs itself, and that needs the features Overleaf charges for, such as single sign-on, unlimited compilation or reference manager integration. It does not suit a reader who only needs to write LaTeX, since the hosted service is free for individuals, and it does not suit anyone who needs a supported contract. Before you deploy it, read the licence, which is AGPL-3.0, and check the base stack requirements in the compose file, because Mongo, Redis and a sharelatex container are what the whole thing runs on.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. ayaka-notes/ayakaleaf-pro on GitHub
2. License: AGPL-3.0
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases