LaTeX Plugin says "Paths to external executables are not configured" even though they are confgured

[Kent Rogers]

I have installed TeX Live 2017 on my RHEL 6.10 system, manually verified it works, added the latex.properties & header/footer files to the CONFLUENCE_HOME/latex directory, and successfully configured the paths to 'dvipng' and 'latex' on the plugin's configuration page, but I still get the following error when I try to insert a LaTeX macro on a page:

Error rendering 'latex' macro: Paths to external executables are not configured, please see plugin settings

Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting] · Accepted solution]

Make sure the user that the Confluence application runs as can execute the commands. That's the one that Confluence uses to manipulate latex. You may need to add to the PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc environment variables.

[Kent Rogers]

Thanks for the reply.  This wasn't the total solution, but it definitely led me to the discovery of all the issues.

I guess the fact that the full path name to the latex & dvipng binaries is set in the LaTeX Plugin configuration caused me to not realize the Confluence user's PATH needed updating.  I also *thought* I had originally tested the installation without updating PATH, but I must have had more in my environment than I realized.

Once I stopped Confluence, updated PATH and then restarted Confluence, I was able to get past the error I mentioned.  Unfortunately, that led to a new error:

[...]

! LaTeX Error: File `preview.sty' not found.

[...]

Pretty quickly, though, I was able to determine, that this was the result of only installing the medium scheme instead of the full scheme of TeX Live.

So, the full answer for me was:

1. If using the TeX Live package as your TeX distribution, make sure you install the full scheme.
2. Make sure that the user that starts up Confluence has the TeX Live binaries in PATH, even though the full path to the latex & dvipng binaries are listed in the LaTeX Plugin configuration.

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Interesting.  It's been a while since I dealt with that App, so thanks for closing the loop! I'm glad you got it sorted out.