TeXbld was first developed by Juni Kim, who, while writing virtually all of his assignments in markup languages during his sophomore year, faced the challenge of reproducing his builds across various operating systems.
At first, mktex, a shell script which could scaffold a simple project from a template, was written. This first implementation, however, relied on a Makefile whose commands were run directly on the system, leaving the build process vulnerable to arbitrary system changes. Docker extensions were then added to mktex so that one could compile a paper in an isolated container with its own pre-determined dependencies. Although somewhat successful at yielding reproducible papers, the docker image (junikimm717/mktex-build) was a single point of failure. This image was also extremely bloated since it had to be capable of building every type of paper, instead of being specialized.
TeXbld is the next iteration on this concept, and aims to preserve image immutability (by building them on the system's docker daemon) and reliably scaffold new projects from images.