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Biber not working

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
55/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
latex, shell
Domain
build-system, devops

Research direction

Start by reproducing the supplied MWE in an Overleaf instance created with the toolkit, then inspect how the container exposes /usr/local/texlive/2024/bin/x86_64-linux/biber and /usr/local/bin/biber. Clear cached files and confirm that compilation invokes biber successfully without the manual symlink; the issue is done when the MWE builds in a fresh toolkit-created instance.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi,

I've been playing around with the toolkit lately, and for containers created with the toolkit it seems like biber is not working. I also found a solution, please consider including it as fix into future versions.

MWE:

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage[autostyle]{csquotes}

\usepackage[
    backend=biber,
    style=authoryear-icomp,
    sortlocale=de_DE,
    natbib=true,
    url=false, 
    doi=true,
    eprint=false
]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\usepackage[]{hyperref}
\hypersetup{
    colorlinks=true,
}

%% ##############################
\begin{document}
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet~\citep{kastenholz}.
    At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum~\citet{sigfridsson}.
    \printbibliography 
\end{document}

biblatex-examples.bib is the example file coming with TeXlive 2024, you can also find it here.

This does work with my local vscode setup, but not with overleaf instances created with the toolkit. However, it will work also with said overleaf instance, if the following command is executed inside the container first:
ln -s /usr/local/texlive/2024/bin/x86_64-linux/biber /usr/local/bin/biber

Now if all cached files are cleared and the document is compiled again it'll work as expected.

References:

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