arara is a TeX automation tool based on rules and directives. It gives you a way to enhance your TeX experience. The tool is an effort to provide a concise way to automate the daily TeX workflow for users and also package writers. Users might write their own rules when the provided ones do not suffice.

We are proud to announce that arara is part of the Island of TeX. The GitHub repository will be used as mirror but development happens on GitLab. Please open relevant issues and merge requests there.

To use arara, you need to tell it what to do. Unlike most other tools, you give arara these directives in the document itself – usually near the top. So to run pdflatex once on your document, you should say something like:

% arara: pdflatex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello, world!
\end{document}

Now when you run arara myfile, that directive (% arara: ...) will be seen and carried out as described by the pdflatex rule. You can read more about rules and directives in the user manual available on our CTAN page or on arara's website. In addition to documenting all of the rules that come standard with arara, the manual gives a detailed explanation of how arara works, as well as how to create and use your own rules.

arara is continuously built by the GitLab CI. For each and every commit, it is ensured that a green tick means arara passes the test suite and is ready to be tested. However, that is not meant you can use the executable artifacts of the builds for productive use.

Development of arara takes place in the development branch. Feel free to be one of our testers and enjoy the latest features and bug fixes by building from there.

If you encounter any bugs or issues when using the development branch, you are most welcome to get in touch with us and discuss potential solutions. We are also always watching out for developers who want to join us making arara even better.

We use a Gitter chatroom for discussing things related to arara. You are more than welcome to come join the fun and say hi! to us. We also have the issues section in our repository as a valid channel to report problems, bugs and suggest improvements.

If you want to stay in the loop of our other projects, feel free to visit our community room on Gitter or alternatively, the Matrix rooms for arara or the community.

Would you like to make arara speak your own language? Splendid! We would love to have you in the team! Just contact us by opening an issue or joining our dedicated chatroom. The localization process is quite straightforward, we can help you! Any language is welcome!

Our tool is available out of the shelf on all major TeX distributions, including TeX Live and MiKTeX, which makes manual installation unnecessary given the significant coverage of such distributions. Chances are you already have arara in your system!

You can obtain the official package available in the releases section of our project repository. Please refer to the documentation on how to manually deploy our tool.

This application is licensed under the New BSD License. Please note that the New BSD License has been verified as a GPL-compatible free software license by the Free Software Foundation, and has been vetted as an open source license by the Open Source Initiative.

arara, the cool TeX automation tool, is brought to you by the Island of TeX. If you want to support TeX development by a donation, the best way to do this is donating to the TeX Users Group.