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Taking a look around

Now that you have a local copy of the Toolkit, let’s take a look at the structure of the repository using the ls command.
Run this
The ls -l command displays a detailed long listing view of the contents of a directory, providing additional file information such as permissions, ownership and size.
If everything was cloned successfully you should see something like this:
All user-owned configuration files are found in the config/ directory. This directory is excluded from the git revision control system, so it will not be changed by updating the Toolkit.

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Repository layout

We recommend not changing files outside of the /config folder directly. Instead, if you need to make changes, they can be done via environment variables set in either config/variables.env or config/overleaf.rc.
For example, to set the mongo service image, rather than editing lib/docker-compose.mongo.yml directly, set the image using the environment variable MONGO_IMAGE in config/overleaf.rc. For more information see the Toolkit settings page.
The Toolkit will not change any data in the config/ directory without your permission.
Last modified on October 4, 2026