Public Access

How to invite guests to join your Overleaf instance?

You can offer access to your Overleaf instance in two ways:

• Share a project link with guests

• Allow users to self-register (only available in ayaka-notes/overleaf-pro)

Guest Access

By default, even if a user obtains a project sharing link, they must log in before they can join a collaborative project editing session.

To allow anonymous access for link-shared projects, set both variables below:

config/variables.env

OVERLEAF_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS_READ_AND_WRITE_SHARING=true
OVERLEAF_ALLOW_PUBLIC_ACCESS=true

OVERLEAF_ALLOW_ANONYMOUS_READ_AND_WRITE_SHARING enables anonymous read/write on link-shared projects.

OVERLEAF_ALLOW_PUBLIC_ACCESS prevents non-authenticated users being redirected to the login page.

Recreate containers with bin/up. Then open a link-sharing URL in a private window.

Public Registration

Public registration is only available in ayaka-notes/overleaf-pro.

Please note that once you enable public registration, anyone with access to your Overleaf instance can register as a user.

The registration process does not verify email addresses, so please only use it on an intranet or in a trusted environment, or disable it when you no longer need registration.

By default, neither the Community Edition nor Overleaf Pro allows public registration.

To enable it, add this to config/variables.env:

config/variables.env

OVERLEAF_ALLOW_PUBLIC_REGISTRATION=true

Recreate containers with bin/up.

Then click Sign up or visit /register.

Registration With Limited Domain

Limited-domain public registration is only available in ayaka-notes/overleaf-pro.

Before enabling this, configure email delivery so users can receive invites and notifications. See Email delivery.

Then add the following line to config/variables.env:

config/variables.env

[email protected]

OVERLEAF_ALLOW_PUBLIC_REGISTRATION can be set to:

• true to allow anyone who can reach the site to register

• @example.domain to restrict registration to emails in that domain