User Guide¶

Quick Start¶

This guide is intended for running Singularity on a computer where you have root (administrative) privileges. If you are learning about Singularity on a system where you lack root privileges, you can still complete the steps that do not require the sudo command. If you need to request an installation on your shared resource, check out our requesting an installation help page for information to send to your system administrator.

Installation¶

There are many ways to install Singularity but this quick start guide will only cover one.

git clone https://github.com/singularityware/singularity.git

cd singularity

./autogen.sh

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

make

sudo make install

Singularity must be installed as root to function properly.

Overview of the Singularity Interface¶

Singularity’s command line interface allows you to build and interact with containers transparently. You can run programs inside a container as if they were running on your host system. You can easily redirect IO, use pipes, pass arguments, and access files, sockets, and ports on the host system from within a container. The --help option gives an overview of Singularity options and subcommands as follows:

$ singularity --help

USAGE: singularity [global options...] <command> [command options...] ...

GLOBAL OPTIONS:

    -d|--debug    Print debugging information

    -h|--help     Display usage summary

    -s|--silent   Only print errors

    -q|--quiet    Suppress all normal output

       --version  Show application version

    -v|--verbose  Increase verbosity +1

    -x|--sh-debug Print shell wrapper debugging information

GENERAL COMMANDS:

    help       Show additional help for a command or container

    selftest   Run some self tests for singularity install

CONTAINER USAGE COMMANDS:

    exec       Execute a command within container

    run        Launch a runscript within container

    shell      Run a Bourne shell within container

    test       Launch a testscript within container

CONTAINER MANAGEMENT COMMANDS:

    apps       List available apps within a container

    bootstrap  *Deprecated* use build instead

    build      Build a new Singularity container

    check      Perform container lint checks

    inspect    Display a container's metadata

    mount      Mount a Singularity container image

    pull       Pull a Singularity/Docker container to $PWD

COMMAND GROUPS:

    image      Container image command group

    instance   Persistent instance command group

CONTAINER USAGE OPTIONS:

    see singularity help <command>

For any additional help or support visit the Singularity

website: https://github.com/singularityware/singularity

For any additional help or support visit the Singularity website: https://www.sylabs.io/contact/ Singularity uses positional syntax. Global options follow the singularity invocation and affect the way that Singularity runs any command. Then commands are passed followed by their options. For example, to pass the --debug option to the main singularity command and run Singularity with debugging messages on:

$ singularity --debug run shub://GodloveD/lolcow

And to pass the --containall option to the run command and run a Singularity image in an isolated manner:

$ singularity run --containall shub://GodloveD/lolcow

To learn more about a specific Singularity command, type one of the following:

$ singularity help <command>

$ singularity --help <command>

$ singularity -h <command>

$ singularity <command> --help

$ singularity <command> -h

Users can also write help docs specific to a container or for an internal module called an app. If those help docs exist for a particular container, you can view them like so.

$ singularity help container.simg            # See the container's help, if provided

$ singularity help --app foo container.simg  # See the help for foo, if provided

Download pre-built images¶

You can use the pull and build commands to download pre-built images from an external resource like Singularity Hub or Docker Hub. When called on a native Singularity images like those provided on Singularity Hub, pull simply downloads the image file to your system.

$ singularity pull shub://vsoch/hello-world   # pull with default name, vsoch-hello-world-master.simg

$ singularity pull --name hello.simg shub://vsoch/hello-world   # pull with custom name

Singularity images can also be pulled and named by an associated GitHub commit or content hash. You can also use pull with the docker:// uri to reference Docker images served from a registry. In this case pull does not just download an image file. Docker images are stored in layers, so pull must also combine those layers into a usable Singularity file.

$ singularity pull docker://godlovedc/lolcow  # with default name

$ singularity pull --name funny.simg docker://godlovedc/lolcow # with custom name

Pulling Docker images reduces reproducibility. If you were to pull a Docker image today and then wait six months and pull again, you are not guaranteed to get the same image. If any of the source layers has changed the image will be altered. If reproducibility is a priority for you, try building your images from Singularity Hub. You can also use the build command to download pre-built images from an external resource. When using build you must specify a name for your container like so:

$ singularity build hello-world.simg shub://vsoch/hello-world

$ singularity build lolcow.simg docker://godlovedc/lolcow

Unlike pull, build will convert your image to the latest Singularity image format after downloading it.

build is like a “Swiss Army knife” for container creation. In addition to downloading images, you can use build to create images from other images or from scratch using a recipe file <container-recipes>. You can also use build to convert an image between the 3 major container formats supported by Singularity. We discuss those image formats below in the Build images from scratch section.

Interact with images¶

Once you have an image, you can interact with it in several ways. For these examples we will use a hello-world.simg image that can be downloaded from Singularity Hub like so.

$ singularity pull --name hello-world.simg shub://vsoch/hello-world

Shell¶

The shell command allows you to spawn a new shell within your container and interact with it as though it were a small virtual machine.

$ singularity shell hello-world.simg

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

# I am the same user inside as outside!

Singularity hello-world.simg:~/Desktop> whoami

vanessa

Singularity hello-world.simg:~/Desktop> id

uid=1000(vanessa) gid=1000(vanessa) groups=1000(vanessa),4(adm),24,27,30(tape),46,113,128,999(input)

shell also works with the shub:// and docker:// URIs. This creates an ephemeral container that disappears when the shell is exited.

$ singularity shell shub://vsoch/hello-world

Executing Commands¶

The exec command allows you to execute a custom command within a container by specifying the image file. For instance, to list the root (/) of our hello-world.simg image, we could do the following:

$ singularity exec hello-world.simg ls /

anaconda-post.log  etc   lib64       mnt   root  singularity  tmp

bin        home  lost+found  opt   run   srv          usr

dev        lib   media       proc  sbin  sys          var

exec also works with the shub:// and docker:// URIs. This creates an ephemeral container that executes a command and disappears.

$ singularity exec shub://singularityhub/ubuntu cat /etc/os-release

Running a container¶

Singularity containers contain runscripts. These are user defined scripts that define the actions a container should perform when someone runs it. The runscript can be triggered with the run command, or simply by calling the container as though it were an executable.

$ singularity run hello-world.simg

$ ./hello-world.simg

run also works with shub:// and docker:// URIs. This creates an ephemeral container that runs and then disappears.

$ singularity run shub://GodloveD/lolcow

Working with Files¶

Files on the host are reachable from within the container.

$ echo "Hello World" > $HOME/hello-kitty.txt

$ singularity exec vsoch-hello-world-master.simg cat $HOME/hello-kitty.txt

Hello World

This example works because hello-kitty.txt exists in the user’s home directory. By default singularity bind mounts /home/$USER, /tmp, and $PWD into your container at runtime. You can specify additional directories to bind mount into your container with the - -bind option. In this example, the data directory on the host system is bind mounted to the /mnt directory inside the container.

$ echo "I am your father" >/data/vader.sez

$ ~/sing-dev/bin/singularity exec --bind /data:/mnt hello-world.simg cat /mnt/vader.sez

I am your father

Build images from scratch¶

As of Singularity v2.4 by default build produces immutable images in the squashfs file format. This ensures reproducible and verifiable images. However, during testing and debugging you may want an image format that is writable. This way you can shell into the image and install software and dependencies until you are satisfied that your container will fulfill your needs. For these scenarios, Singularity supports two other image formats: a sandbox format (which is really just a chroot directory), and a writable format (the ext3 file system that was used in Singularity versions less than 2.4).

For more details about the different build options and best practices, read about the singularity flow.

Sandbox Directory¶

To build into a sandbox (container in a directory) use the build --sandbox command and option:

$ sudo singularity build --sandbox ubuntu/ docker://ubuntu

This command creates a directory called ubuntu/ with an entire Ubuntu Operating System and some Singularity metadata in your current working directory. You can use commands like shell, exec , and run with this directory just as you would with a Singularity image. You can also write files to this directory from within a Singularity session (provided you have the permissions to do so). These files will be ephemeral and will disappear when the container is finished executing. However if you use the --writable option the changes will be saved into your directory so that you can use them the next time you use your container.

Writable Image¶

If you prefer to have a writable image file, you can build a container with the --writable option.

$ sudo singularity build --writable ubuntu.img docker://ubuntu

This produces an image that is writable with an ext3 file system. Unlike the sandbox, it is a single image file. Also by convention this file name has an “.img” extension instead of “.simg” . When you want to alter your image, you can use commands like shell, exec, run, with the --writable option. Because of permission issues it may be necessary to execute the container as root to modify it.

$ sudo singularity shell --writable ubuntu.img

Converting images from one format to another¶

The build command allows you to build a container from an existing container. This means that you can use it to convert a container from one format to another. For instance, if you have already created a sandbox (directory) and want to convert it to the default immutable image format (squashfs) you can do so:

$ singularity build new-squashfs sandbox

Doing so may break reproducibility if you have altered your sandbox outside of the context of a recipe file, so you are advised to exercise care. You can use build to convert containers to and from writable, sandbox, and default (squashfs) file formats via any of the six possible combinations.

Singularity Recipes¶

For a reproducible, production-quality container, we recommend that you build a container with the default (squashfs) file format using a Singularity recipe file. This also makes it easy to add files, environment variables, and install custom software, and still start from your base of choice (e.g., Singularity Hub). A recipe file has a header and a body. The header determines what kind of base container to begin with, and the body is further divided into sections (called scriptlets) that do things like install software, setup the environment, and copy files into the container from the host system. Here is an example of a recipe file:

Bootstrap: shub

From: singularityhub/ubuntu

%runscript

    exec echo "The runscript is the containers default runtime command!"

%files

   /home/vanessa/Desktop/hello-kitty.txt        # copied to root of container

   /home/vanessa/Desktop/party_dinosaur.gif     /opt/the-party-dino.gif #

%environment

    VARIABLE=MEATBALLVALUE

    export VARIABLE

%labels

   AUTHOR vsochat@stanford.edu

%post

    apt-get update && apt-get -y install python3 git wget

    mkdir /data

    echo "The post section is where you can install, and configure your container."

To build a container from this definition file (assuming it is a file named Singularity), you would call build like so:

$ sudo singularity build ubuntu.simg Singularity

In this example, the header tells singularity to use a base Ubuntu image from Singularity Hub. The %runscript section defines actions for the container to take when it is executed (in this case a simple message). The %files section copies some files into the container from the host system at build time. The %environment section defines some environment variables that will be available to the container at runtime. The %labels section allows for custom metadata to be added to the container. And finally the %post section executes within the container at build time after the base OS has been installed. The %post section is therefore the place to perform installations of custom apps. This is a very small example of the things that you can do with a recipe file . In addition to building a container from Singularity Hub, you can start with base images from Docker Hub, use images directly from official repositories such as Ubuntu, Debian, Centos, Arch, and BusyBox, use an existing container on your host system as a base, or even take a snapshot of the host system itself and use that as a base image. If you want to build Singularity images without having singularity installed in a build environment, you can build images using Singularity Hub instead. If you want a more detailed rundown and examples for different build options, see our singularity flow page.

Introduction¶

This document will introduce you to Singularity, and the links in the bar to the left will give you more detail on using the software. If you want to get a quick rundown, see our quickstart. If you want to understand which commands are best fit for your usecase, see our build flow page. There is also a separate Singularity Administration Guide that targets system administrators, so if you are a service provider, or an interested user, it is encouraged that you read that document as well.

Welcome to Singularity!¶

Singularity is a container solution created by necessity for scientific and application driven workloads. Over the past decade and a half, virtualization has gone from an engineering toy to a global infrastructure necessity and the evolution of enabling technologies has flourished. Most recently, we have seen the introduction of the latest spin on virtualization… “containers”. People tend to view containers in light of their virtual machine ancestry and these preconceptions influence feature sets and expected use cases. This is both a good and a bad thing… For industry and enterprise-centric container technologies this is a good thing. Web enabled cloud requirements are very much in alignment with the feature set of virtual machines, and thus the preceding container technologies. But the idea of containers as miniature virtual machines is a bad thing for the scientific world and specifically the high performance computation (HPC) community. While there are many overlapping requirements in these two fields, they differ in ways that make a shared implementation generally incompatible. Some groups have leveraged custom-built resources that can operate on a lower performance scale, but proper integration is difficult and perhaps impossible with today’s technology. Many scientists could benefit greatly by using container technology, but they need a feature set that differs somewhat from that available with current container technology. This necessity drives the creation of Singularity and articulated its four primary functions:

Mobility of Compute¶

Mobility of compute is defined as the ability to define, create and maintain a workflow and be confident that the workflow can be executed on different hosts, operating systems (as long as it is Linux) and service providers. Being able to contain the entire software stack, from data files to library stack, and portably move it from system to system is true mobility. Singularity achieves this by utilizing a distributable image format that contains the entire container and stack into a single file. This file can be copied, shared, archived, and standard UNIX file permissions also apply. Additionally containers are portable (even across different C library versions and implementations) which makes sharing and copying an image as easy as cp or scp or ftp.

Reproducibility¶

As mentioned above, Singularity containers utilize a single file which is the complete representation of all the files within the container. The same features which facilitate mobility also facilitate reproducibility. Once a contained workflow has been defined, the container image can be snapshotted, archived, and locked down such that it can be used later and you can be confident that the code within the container has not changed.

User Freedom¶

System integrators, administrators, and engineers spend a lot of effort maintaining their systems, and tend to take a cautious approach. As a result, it is common to see hosts installed with production, mission critical operating systems that are “old” and have few installed packages. Users may find software or libraries that are too old or incompatible with the software they must run, or the environment may just lack the software stack they need due to complexities with building, specific software knowledge, incompatibilities or conflicts with other installed programs.

Singularity can give the user the freedom they need to install the applications, versions, and dependencies for their workflows without impacting the system in any way. Users can define their own working environment and literally copy that environment image (single file) to a shared resource, and run their workflow inside that image.

Support on Existing Traditional HPC¶

Replicating a virtual machine cloud like environment within an existing HPC resource is not a reasonable goal for many administrators. There are a lots of container systems available which are designed for enterprise, as a replacement for virtual machines, are cloud focused, or require unstable or unavailable kernel features. Singularity supports existing and traditional HPC resources as easily as installing a single package onto the host operating system. Custom configurations may be achieved via a single configuration file, and the defaults are tuned to be generally applicable for shared environments. Singularity can run on host Linux distributions from RHEL6 (RHEL5 for versions lower than 2.2) and similar vintages, and the contained images have been tested as far back as Linux 2.2 (approximately 14 years old). Singularity natively supports InfiniBand, Lustre, and works seamlessly with all resource managers (e.g. SLURM, Torque, SGE, etc.) because it works like running any other command on the system. It also has built-in support for MPI and for containers that need to leverage GPU resources.

A High Level View of Singularity¶

Security and privilege escalation¶

A user inside a Singularity container is the same user as outside the container This is one of Singularities defining characteristics. It allows a user (that may already have shell access to a particular host) to simply run a command inside of a container image as themselves. Here is a scenario to help articulate this:

%SERVER and %CLUSTER are large expensive systems with resources far exceeding those of my personal workstation. But because the are shared systems, no users have root access. The environments are tightly controlled and managed by a staff of system administrators. To keep these systems secure, only the system administrators are granted root access and they control the state of the operating systems and installed applications. If a user is able to escalate to root (even within a container) on %SERVER or %CLUSTER, they can do bad things to the network, cause denial of service to the host (as well as other hosts on the same network), and may have unrestricted access to file systems reachable by the container.

To mitigate security concerns like this, Singularity limits one’s ability to escalate permission inside a container. For example, if I do not have root access on the target system, I should not be able to escalate my privileges within the container to root either. This is semi-antagonistic to Singularity’s 3rd tenant; allowing the users to have freedom of their own environments. Because if a user has the freedom to create and manipulate their own container environment, surely they know how to escalate their privileges to root within that container. Possible means could be setting the root user’s password, or enabling themselves to have sudo access. For these reasons, Singularity prevents user context escalation within the container, and thus makes it possible to run user supplied containers on shared infrastructures. This mitigation dictates the Singularity workflow. If a user needs to be root in order to make changes to their containers, then they need to have an endpoint (a local workstation, laptop, or server) where they have root access. Considering almost everybody at least has a laptop, this is not an unreasonable or unmanageable mitigation, but it must be defined and articulated.

The Singularity container image¶

Singularity makes use of a container image file, which physically contains the container. This file is a physical representation of the container environment itself. If you obtain an interactive shell within a Singularity container, you are literally running within that file. This simplifies management of files to the element of least surprise, basic file permission. If you either own a container image, or have read access to that container image, you can start a shell inside that image. If you wish to disable or limit access to a shared image, you simply change the permission ACLs to that file. There are numerous benefits for using a single file image for the entire container:

Copying or branching an entire container is as simple as cp
Permission/access to the container is managed via standard file system permissions
Large scale performance (especially over parallel file systems) is very efficient
No caching of the image contents to run (especially nice on clusters)
Containers are compressed and consume very little disk space
Images can serve as stand-alone programs, and can be executed like any other program on the host

Supported container formats¶

squashfs: the default container format is a compressed read-only file system that is widely used for things like live CDs/USBs and cell phone OS’s
ext3: (also called writable) a writable image file containing an ext3 file system that was the default container format prior to Singularity version 2.4
directory: (also called sandbox) standard Unix directory containing a root container image
tar.gz: zlib compressed tar archive
tar.bz2: bzip2 compressed tar archive
tar: uncompressed tar archive

Supported URIs¶

Singularity also supports several different mechanisms for obtaining the images using a standard URI format.

shub:// Singularity Hub is our own registry for Singularity containers. If you want to publish a container, or give easy access to others from their command line, or enable automatic builds, you should build it on Singularity Hub.
docker:// Singularity can pull Docker images from a Docker registry, and will run them non-persistently (e.g. changes are not persisted as they can not be saved upstream). Note that pulling a Docker image implies assembling layers at runtime, and two subsequent pulls are not guaranteed to produce an identical image.
instance:// A Singularity container running as service, called an instance, can be referenced with this URI.

Name-spaces and isolation¶

When asked, “What namespaces does Singularity virtualize?”, the most appropriate response from a Singularity use case is “As few as possible!”. This is because the goals of Singularity are mobility, reproducibility and freedom, not full isolation (as you would expect from industry driven container technologies). Singularity only separates the needed namespaces in order to satisfy our primary goals.

Coupling incomplete isolation with the fact that a user inside a container is the same user outside the container, allows Singularity to blur the lines between a container and the underlying host system. Using Singularity feels like running in a parallel universe, where there are two timelines. In one timeline, the system administrators installed their operating system of choice. But on an alternate timeline, we bribed the system administrators and they installed our favorite operating system and apps, and gave us full control but configured the rest of the system identically. And Singularity gives us the power to pick between these two timelines. In other words, Singularity allows you to virtually swap out the underlying operating system for one that you’ve defined without affecting anything else on the system and still having all of the host resources available to us. It’s like ssh’ing into another identical host running a different operating system. One moment you are on Centos-6 and the next minute you are on the latest version of Ubuntu that has Tensorflow installed, or Debian with the latest OpenFoam, or a custom workflow that you installed. But you are still the same user with the same files running the same PIDs. Additionally, the selection of name-space virtualization can be dynamic or conditional. For example, the PID namespace is not separated from the host by default, but if you want to separate it, you can with a command line (or environment variable) setting. You can also decide you want to contain a process so it can not reach out to the host file system if you don’t know if you trust the image. But by default, you are allowed to interface with all of the resources, devices and network inside the container as you are outside the container.

Compatibility with standard work-flows, pipes and IO¶

Singularity abstracts the complications of running an application in an environment that differs from the host. For example, applications or scripts within a Singularity container can easily be part of a pipeline that is being executed on the host. Singularity containers can also be executed from a batch script or other program (e.g. an HPC system’s resource manager) natively. Some usage examples of Singularity can be seen as follows:

$ singularity exec dummy.img xterm  # run xterm from within the container

$ singularity exec dummy.img python script.py  # run a script on the host system using container's python

$ singularity exec dummy.img python < /path/to/python/script.py  # do the same via redirection

$ cat /path/to/python/script.py | singularity exec dummy.img python  # do the same via a pipe

You can even run MPI executables within the container as simply as:

$ mpirun -np X singularity exec /path/to/container.img /usr/bin/mpi_program_inside_container (mpi program args)

The Singularity Process Flow¶

When executing container commands, the Singularity process flow can be generalized as follows:

Singularity application is invoked
Global options are parsed and activated
The Singularity command (subcommand) process is activated
Subcommand options are parsed
The appropriate sanity checks are made
Environment variables are set
The Singularity Execution binary is called (sexec)
Sexec determines if it is running privileged and calls the SUID code if necessary
Namespaces are created depending on configuration and process requirements
The Singularity image is checked, parsed, and mounted in the namespace
Bind mount points are setup so that files on the host are visible in the CLONE_NEWNS container
The namespace CLONE_FS is used to virtualize a new root file system
Singularity calls execvp() and Singularity process itself is replaced by the process inside the container
When the process inside the container exits, all namespaces collapse with that process, leaving a clean system

All of the above steps take approximately 15-25 thousandths of a second to run, which is fast enough to seem instantaneous.

The Singularity Usage Workflow¶

The security model of Singularity (as described above, “A user inside a Singularity container is the same user as outside the container”) defines the Singularity workflow. There are generally two groups of actions you must implement on a container; management (building your container) and usage.

In many circumstances building containers require root administrative privileges just like these actions would require on any system, container, or virtual machine. This means that a user must have access to a system on which they have root privileges. This could be a server, workstation, a laptop, virtual machine, or even a cloud instance. If you are using OS X or Windows on your laptop, it is recommended to setup Vagrant, and run Singularity from there (there are recipes for this which can be found at Once you have Singularity installed on your endpoint of choice, this is where you will do the bulk of your container development. This workflow can be described visually as follows:

Singularity workflow

On the left side, you have your build environment: a laptop, workstation, or a server that you control. Here you will (optionally):

develop and test containers using --sandbox (build into a writable directory) or --writable (build into a writable ext3 image)
build your production containers with a squashfs filesystem.

Once you have the container with the necessary applications, libraries and data inside it can be easily shared to other hosts and executed without requiring root access. A production container should be an immutable object, so if you need to make changes to your container you should go back to your build system with root privileges, rebuild the container with the necessary changes, and then re-upload the container to the production system where you wish to run it.

Singularity Commands¶

How do the commands work?

Here is where to look for more information:

build : Build a container on your user endpoint or build environment
exec : Execute a command to your container
inspect : See labels, run and test scripts, and environment variables
pull : pull an image from Docker or Singularity Hub
run : Run your image as an executable
shell : Shell into your image

Image Commands

image.import : import layers or other file content to your image
image.export : export the contents of the image to tar or stream
image.create : create a new image, using the old ext3 filesystem
image.expand : increase the size of your image (old ext3)

Instance Commands

Instances were added in 2.4. This list is brief, and likely to expand with further development.

instances : Start, stop, and list container instances

Deprecated Commands The following commands are deprecated in 2.4 and will be removed in future releases.

bootstrap : Bootstrap a container recipe

Support¶

Have a question, or need further information? Reach out to us.

Installation¶

This document will guide you through the process of installing Singularity from source with the version and location of your choice.

Before you begin¶

If you have an earlier version of Singularity installed, you should remove it before executing the installation commands.

These instructions will build Singularity from source on your system. So you will need to have some development tools installed. If you run into missing dependencies, try installing them like so:

$ sudo apt-get update && \

    sudo apt-get install \

    python \

    dh-autoreconf \

    build-essential \

    libarchive-dev

$ sudo yum update && \

    sudo yum groupinstall 'Development Tools' && \

    sudo yum install libarchive-devel

Install the master branch¶

The following commands will install the latest version of the GitHub repo master branch to /usr/local.

$ git clone https://github.com/singularityware/singularity.git

$ cd singularity

$ ./autogen.sh

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/etc

$ make

$ sudo make install

If you omit the --sysconfdir option , the configuration file will be installed in /usr/local/etc. If you omit the --prefix option, Singularity will be installed in the /usr/local directory hierarchy by default. And if you specify a custom directory with the --prefix option, all of Singularity’s binaries and the configuration file will be installed within that directory. This last option can be useful if you want to install multiple versions of Singularity, install Singularity on a shared system, or if you want to remove Singularity easily after installing it.

Install a specific release¶

The following commands will install a specific release from GitHub releases page to /usr/local.

$ VER=2.5.1

$ wget https://github.com/singularityware/singularity/releases/download/$VER/singularity-$VER.tar.gz

$ tar xvf singularity-$VER.tar.gz

$ cd singularity-$VER

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/etc

$ make

$ sudo make install

Install the development branch¶

If you want to test a development branch the routine above should be tweaked slightly:

$ git clone https://github.com/singularityware/singularity.git

$ cd singularity

$ git fetch

$ git checkout development

$ ./autogen.sh

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/etc

$ make

$ sudo make install

Remove an old version¶

Let’s say that we installed Singularity to /usr/local. To remove it completely, you need to hit all of the following:

$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/libexec/singularity

$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/etc/singularity

$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/include/singularity

$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/lib/singularity

$ sudo rm -rf /usr/local/var/lib/singularity/

$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/singularity

$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/run-singularity

$ sudo rm /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/singularity

$ sudo rm /usr/local/man/man1/singularity.1

If you modified the system configuration directory, remove the singularity.conf file there as well. If you installed Singularity in a custom directory, you need only remove that directory to uninstall Singularity. For instance if you installed singularity with the --prefix=/some/temp/dir option argument pair, you can remove Singularity like so:

$ sudo rm -rf /some/temp/dir

What should you do next? You can check out the quickstart guide, or learn how to interact with your container via the shell , exec , or run commands. Or click next below to continue reading.

Build a Container¶

build is the “Swiss army knife” of container creation. You can use it to download and assemble existing containers from external resources like Singularity Hub and Docker Hub. You can use it to convert containers between the various formats supported by Singularity. And you can use it in conjunction with a Singularity recipe file to create a container from scratch and customized it to fit your needs.

Overview¶

The build command accepts a target as input and produces a container as output.

The target defines the method that build uses to create the container. It can be one of the following:

URI beginning with shub:// to build from Singularity Hub
URI beginning with docker:// to build from Docker Hub
path to a existing container on your local machine
path to a directory to build from a sandbox
path to an archive in .tar or compressed .tar.gz format
path to a Singularity recipe file

In addition build can produce containers in three different formats. Formats types can be specified by passing the following options to build.

compressed read-only squashfs file system suitable for production (default)
writable ext3 file system suitable for interactive development ( --writable option )
writable (ch)root directory called a sandbox for interactive development ( --sandbox option)

Because build can accept an existing container as a target and create a container in any of these three formats you can convert existing containers from one format to another.

The following diagram illustrates the targets that can be supplied to build as inputs and the containers build can produce as outputs. Green arrows represent operations that can be carried out without root privileges (though the container may not perform properly when run as root). Red arrows represent operations that must be carried out with root privileges.

Singularity build process

Downloading a existing container from Singularity Hub¶

You can use the build command to download a container from Singularity Hub.

$ singularity build lolcow.simg shub://GodloveD/lolcow

The first argument (lolvow.simg) specifies a path and name for your container. The second argument (shub://GodloveD/lolcow) gives the Singularity Hub URI from which to download. But default the container will be converted to a compressed, read-only squashfs file. If you want your container in a different format use the --writable or --sandbox options.

Downloading a existing container from Docker Hub¶

You can use build to download layers from Docker Hub and assemble them into Singularity containers.

$ singularity build lolcow.simg docker://godlovedc/lolcow

Creating `--writable` images and `--sandbox` directories¶

`--writable`¶

If you wanted to create a writable ext3 image similar to those used by Singularity version < 2.4, you could do so with the --writable option. You must create writable containers as root.

Extending the Singularity Hub example from above:

$ sudo singularity build --writable lolcow.img shub://GodloveD/lolcow

The resulting container is writable, but is still mounted as read-only when executed with commands such as run, exec, and shell. To mount the container as read-write when using these commands add the --writable option to them as well.

To ensure that you have the proper permissions to write to the container as you like, it is also a good idea to make changes as root. For example:

$ sudo singularity shell --writable lolcow.img

`--sandbox`¶

If you wanted to create a container within a writable directory (called a sandbox) you could do so with the --sandbox option. It’s possible to create a sandbox without root privileges, but to ensure proper file permissions it is recommended to do so as root.

$ sudo singularity build --sandbox lolcow/ shub://GodloveD/lolcow

The resulting directory operates just like a container in an image file. You are permitted to make changes and write files within the directory, but those changes will not persist when you are finished using the container. To make your changes persistent, use the --writable flag when you invoke your container. Once again, it’s a good idea to do this as root to ensure you have permission to access the files and directories that you want to change.

$ sudo singularity shell --writable lolcow/

Converting containers from one format to another¶

If you already have a container saved locally, you can use it as a target to build a new container. This allows you convert containers from one format to another. For example if you had a squashfs container called production.simg and wanted to convert it to a writable ext3 container called development.img you could:

$ sudo singularity build --writable development.img production.simg

Similarly, to convert it to a writable directory (a sandbox):

$ singularity build --sandbox development/ production.simg

If you omit any options you can also convert your sandbox back to a read-only compressed squashfs image suitable for use in a production environment:

$ singularity build production2 development/

You can convert the three supported container formats using any combination.

Use care when converting writable ext3 images or sandbox directories to the default squashfs file format. If changes were made to the writable container before conversion, there is no record of those changes in the Singularity recipe file rendering your container non-reproducible. It is a best practice to build your immutable production containers directly from a Singularity recipe file instead.

Building containers from Singularity recipe files¶

Of course, Singularity recipe files can be used as the target when building a container. For detailed information on writing Singularity recipe files, please see the Container Recipes docs. Let’s say you already have the following container recipe file called Singularity , and you want to use it to build a container.

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu:16.04

%post

    apt-get -y update

    apt-get -y install fortune cowsay lolcat

%environment

    export LC_ALL=C

    export PATH=/usr/games:$PATH

%runscript

    fortune | cowsay | lolcat

You can do so with the following command.

$ sudo singularity build lolcow.simg Singularity

The command requires sudo just as installing software on your local machine requires root privileges.

`--force`¶

You can build into the same container multiple times (though the results may be unpredictable and it is generally better to delete your container and start from scratch).

By default if you build into an existing container, the build command will skip the steps involved in adding a new base. You can override this default with the --force option requiring that a new base OS is bootstrapped into the existing container. This behavior does not delete the existing OS, it just adds the new OS on top of the existing one.

Use care with this option: you may get results that you did not expect.

`--section`¶

If you only want to build a single section of your Singularity recipe file use the --section option. For instance, if you have edited the %environment section of a long Singularity recipe and don’t want to completely re-build the container, you could re-build only the %environment section like so:

$ sudo singularity build --section environment image.simg Singularity

Under normal build conditions, the Singularity recipe file is saved into a container’s meta-data so that there is a record showing how the container was built. Using the --section option may render this meta-data useless, so use care if you value reproducibility.

`--notest`¶

If you don’t want to run the %test section during the container build, you can skip it with the --notest option. For instance, maybe you are building a container intended to run in a production environment with GPUs. But perhaps your local build resource does not have GPUs. You want to include a %test section that runs a short validation but you don’t want your build to exit with an error because it cannot find a GPU on your system.

$ sudo singularity build GPU.simg --notest Singularity

`--checks`¶

Checks are a new feature (in 2.4) that offer an easy way for an admin to define a security (or any other kind of check) to be run on demand for a Singularity image. They are defined (and run) via different tags.

CHECKS OPTIONS:

    -c|--checks    enable checks

    -t|--tag       specify a check tag (not default)

    -l|--low       Specify low threshold (all checks, default)

    -m|--med       Perform medium and high checks

    -h|--high      Perform only checks at level high

When you add the --checks option along with applicable tags to the build command Singularity will run the desired checks on your container at build time. See singularity check --help for available tags.

Build Environment¶

It’s commonly the case that you want to customize your build environment, such as specifying a custom cache directory for layers, or sending your Docker Credentials to the registry endpoint. Here we will discuss those things

Cache Folders¶

To make download of layers for build and pull faster and less redundant, we use a caching strategy. By default, the Singularity software will create a set of folders in your $HOME directory for docker layers, Singularity Hub images, and Docker metadata, respectively:

$HOME/.singularity

$HOME/.singularity/docker

$HOME/.singularity/shub

$HOME/.singularity/metadata

Fear not, you have control to customize this behavior! If you don’t want the cache to be created (and a temporary directory will be used), set SINGULARITY_DISABLE_CACHE to True/yes, or if you want to move it elsewhere, set SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR to the full path where you want to cache. Remember that when you run commands as sudo this will use root’s home at /root and not your user’s home.

Temporary Folders¶

Singularity also uses some temporary directories to build the squashfs filesystem, so this temp space needs to be large enough to hold the entire resulting Singularity image. By default this happens in /tmp but can be overridden by setting SINGULARITY_TMPDIR to the full path where you want the squashfs temp files to be stored. Since images are typically built as root, be sure to set this variable in root’s environment.

If you are building an image on the fly, for example

singularity exec docker://busybox /bin/sh

by default a temporary runtime directory is created that looks like /tmp/.singularity-runtime.xxxxxxxx.

This can be problematic for some /tmp directories that are hosted at Jetstream/OpenStack, Azure, and possibly EC2, which are very small. If you need to change the location of this runtime, then export the variable SINGULARITY_LOCALCACHEDIR.

SINGULARITY_LOCALCACHEDIR=/tmp/pancakes

export SINGULARITY_LOCALCACHEDIR

singularity exec docker://busybox /bin/sh

The above runtime folder would be created under /tmp/pancakes/.singularity-runtime.xxxxxxxx

Pull Folder¶

For details about customizing the output location of pull, see the pull docs. You have the similar ability to set it to be something different, or to customize the name of the pulled image.

Environment Variables¶

All environmental variables are parsed by Singularity python helper functions, and specifically the file defaults.py is a gateway between variables defined at runtime, and pre-defined defaults. By way of import from the file, variables set at runtime do not change if re-imported. This was done intentionally to prevent changes during the execution, and could be changed if needed. For all variables, the order of operations works as follows:

First preference goes to environment variable set at runtime
Second preference goes to default defined in this file
Then, if neither is found, null is returned except in the case that required=True. A required=True variable not found will system exit with an error.
Variables that should not be displayed in debug logger are set with silent=True, and are only reported to be defined.

For boolean variables, the following are acceptable for True, with any kind of capitalization or not:

("yes", "true", "t", "1","y")

Cache¶

The location and usage of the cache is also determined by environment variables.

SINGULARITY_DISABLE_CACHE If you want to disable the cache, this means is that the layers are written to a temporary directory. Thus, if you want to disable cache and write to a temporary folder, simply set SINGULARITY_DISABLE_CACHE to any true/yes value. By default, the cache is not disabled.

SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR Is the base folder for caching layers and singularity hub images. If not defined, it uses default of $HOME/.singularity. If defined, the defined location is used instead.

If SINGULARITY_DISABLE_CACHE is set to True, this value is ignored in favor of a temporary directory. For specific sub-types of things to cache, subdirectories are created (by python), including $SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR/docker for docker layers and $SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR/shub for Singularity Hub images. If the cache is not created, the Python script creates it.

SINGULARITY_PULLFOLDER While this isn’t relevant for build, since build is close to pull, we will include it here. By default, images are pulled to the present working directory. The user can change this variable to change that.

SINGULARITY_TMPDIR Is the base folder for squashfs image temporary building. If not defined, it uses default of $TEMPDIR. If defined, the defined location is used instead.

SINGULARITY_LOCALCACHEDIR Is the temporary folder (default /tmp) to generate runtime folders (containers “on the fly”) typically a run, exec , or shell or a docker:// image. This is different from where downloaded layers are cached ($SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR) or pulled (SINGULARITY_PULLFOLDER) or where a (non on-the-fly build) happens ( $SINGULARITY_TMPDIR ). See temporary folders above for an example. You can generally determine the value of this setting by running a command with --debug , and seeing the last line “Removing directory:”

singularity --debug run docker://busybox echo "pizza!"

...

DEBUG   [U=1000,P=960]     s_rmdir()                                 Removing directory: /tmp/.singularity-runtime.oArO0k

Defaults¶

The following variables have defaults that can be customized by you via environment variables at runtime.

Docker¶

DOCKER_API_BASE Set as index.docker.io, which is the name of the registry. In the first version of Singularity we parsed the Registry argument from the build spec file, however now this is removed because it can be obtained directly from the image name (eg, registry/namespace/repo:tag). If you don’t specify a registry name for your image, this default is used. If you have trouble with your registry being detected from the image URI, use this variable.

DOCKER_API_VERSION Is the version of the Docker Registry API currently being used, by default now is v2. DOCKER_OS This is exposed via the exported environment variable SINGULARITY_DOCKER_OS and pertains to images that reveal a version 2 manifest with a manifest list. In the case that the list is present, we must choose an operating system (this variable) and an architecture (below). The default is linux.

DOCKER_ARCHITECTURE This is exposed via the exported environment variable SINGULARITY_DOCKER_ARCHITECTURE and the same applies as for the DOCKER_OS with regards to being used in context of a list of manifests. In the case that the list is present, we must choose an architecture (this variable) and an os (above). The default is amd64, and other common ones include arm, arm64, ppc64le, 386, and s390x. NAMESPACE Is the default namespace, library.

RUNSCRIPT_COMMAND Is not obtained from the environment, but is a hard coded default (“/bin/bash”). This is the fallback command used in the case that the docker image does not have a CMD or ENTRYPOINT. TAG Is the default tag, latest.

SINGULARITY_NOHTTPS This is relevant if you want to use a registry that doesn’t have https, and it speaks for itself. If you export the variable SINGULARITY_NOHTTPS you can force the software to not use https when interacting with a Docker registry. This use case is typically for use of a local registry.

Singularity Hub¶

SHUB_API_BASE The default base for the Singularity Hub API, which is https://singularity-hub.org/api. If you deploy your own registry, you don’t need to change this, you can again specify the registry name in the URI.

General¶

SINGULARITY_PYTHREADS The Python modules use threads (workers) to download layer files for Docker, and change permissions. By default, we will use 9 workers, unless the environment variable SINGULARITY_PYTHREADS is defined. SINGULARITY_COMMAND_ASIS By default, we want to make sure the container running process gets passed forward as the current process, so we want to prefix whatever the Docker command or entrypoint is with exec. We also want to make sure that following arguments get passed, so we append "$@". Thus, some entrypoint or cmd might look like this:

/usr/bin/python

and we would parse it into the runscript as:

exec /usr/bin/python "$@"

However, it might be the case that the user does not want this. For this reason, we have the environmental variable RUNSCRIPT_COMMAND_ASIS. If defined as yes/y/1/True/true, etc., then the runscript will remain as /usr/bin/python.

Container Recipes¶

A Singularity Recipe is the driver of a custom build, and the starting point for designing any custom container. It includes specifics about installation software, environment variables, files to add, and container metadata. You can even write a help section, or define modular components in the container called based on the Scientific Filesystem.

Overview¶

A Singularity Recipe file is divided into several parts:

Header: The Header describes the core operating system to build within the container. Here you will configure the base operating system features that you need within your container. Examples of this include, what distribution of Linux, what version, what packages must be part of a core install.
Sections: The rest of the definition is comprised of sections, sometimes called scriptlets or blobs of data. Each section is defined by a % character followed by the name of the particular section. All sections are optional. Sections that are executed at build time are executed with the /bin/sh interpreter and can accept bin/sh options. Similarly, sections that produce scripts to be executed at runtime can accept options intended for /bin/sh

Please see the examples directory in the Singularity source code for some ideas on how to get started.

Header¶

The header is at the top of the file, and tells Singularity the base Operating System that it should use to build the container. It is composed of several keywords. Specifically:

Bootstrap: references the kind of base you want to use (e.g., docker, debootstrap, shub). For example, a shub bootstrap will pull containers for shub as bases. A Docker bootstrap will pull docker layers to start your image. For a full list see build
From: is the named container (shub) or reference to layers (Docker) that you want to use (e.g., vsoch/hello-world)

Depending on the value assigned to Bootstrap, other keywords may also be valid in the header.

For example, a very minimal Singularity Hub build might look like this:

Bootstrap: shub

From: vsoch/hello-world

A build that uses a mirror to install Centos-7 might look like this:

Bootstrap: yum

OSVersion: 7

MirrorURL: http://mirror.centos.org/centos-%{OSVERSION}/%{OSVERSION}/os/$basearch/

Include: yum

Each build base requires particular details during build time. You can read about them and see examples at the following links:

shub (images hosted on Singularity Hub)
docker (images hosted on Docker Hub)
localimage (images saved on your machine)
yum (yum based systems such as CentOS and Scientific Linux)
debootstrap (apt based systems such as Debian and Ubuntu)
arch (Arch Linux)
busybox (BusyBox)
zypper (zypper based systems such as Suse and OpenSuse)

Sections¶

The main content of the bootstrap file is broken into sections. Different sections add different content or execute commands at different times during the build process. Note that if any command fails, the build process will halt. Let’s add each section to our container to see how it works. For each section, we will build the container from the recipe (a file called Singularity) as follows:

$ sudo singularity build roar.simg Singularity

%help¶

You don’t need to do much programming to add a %help section to your container. Just write it into a section:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

%help

Help me. I'm in the container.

And it will work when the user asks the container for help.

$ singularity help roar.simg

Help me. I'm in the container.

%setup¶

Commands in the %setup section are executed on the host system outside of the container after the base OS has been installed. For versions earlier than 2.3 if you need files during %post, you should copy files from your host to $SINGULARITY_ROOTFS to move them into the container. For >2.3 you can add files to the container (added before %post) using the %files section. We can see the difference between %setup and %post in the following asciicast:

In the above, we see that copying something to $SINGULARITY_ROOTFS during %setup was successful to move the file into the container, but copying during %post was not. Let’s add a setup to our current container, just writing a file to the root of the image:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

%help

Help me. I'm in the container.

%setup

    touch ${SINGULARITY_ROOTFS}/tacos.txt

    touch avocados.txt

Importantly, notice that the avocados file isn’t relative to $SINGULARITY_ROOTFS, so we would expect it not to be in the image. Is tacos there?

$ singularity exec roar.simg ls /

bin   environment  lib    mnt   root  scif     sys        usr

boot  etc      lib64  opt   run   singularity  **tacos.txt**  var

dev   home     media  proc  sbin  srv      tmp

Yes! And avocados.txt isn’t inside the image, but in our present working directory:

$ ls

avocados.txt   roar.simg   Singularity

%files¶

If you want to copy files from your host system into the container, you should do so using the %files section. Each line is a pair of <source> and <destination>, where the source is a path on your host system, and the destination is a path in the container.

The %files section uses the traditional cp command, so the same conventions apply Files are copied before any %post or installation procedures for Singularity versions >2.3. If you are using a legacy version, files are copied after %post so you must do this via %setup. Let’s add the avocado.txt into the container, to join tacos.txt.

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

%help

Help me. I'm in the container.

# Both of the below are copied before %post

# 1. This is how to copy files for legacy < 2.3

%setup

    touch ${SINGULARITY_ROOTFS}/tacos.txt

    touch avocados.txt

# 2. This is how to copy files for >= 2.3

%files

    avocados.txt

    avocados.txt /opt

Notice that I’m adding the same file to two different places. For the first, I’m adding the single file to the root of the image. For the second, I’m adding it to opt. Does it work?

$ singularity exec roar.simg ls /

 singularity exec roar.simg ls /

**avocados.txt**  dev      home   media  proc  sbin     srv        tmp

bin       environment  lib    mnt    root  scif     sys        usr

boot          etc      lib64  opt    run   singularity  **tacos.txt**  var

$ singularity exec roar.simg ls /opt

**avocados.txt**

We have avocados!

%labels¶

To store metadata with your container, you can add them to the %labels section. They will be stored in the file /.singularity.d/labels.json as metadata within your container. The general format is a LABELNAME followed by a LABELVALUE. Labels from Docker bootstraps will be carried forward here. Let’s add to our example:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

%help

Help me. I'm in the container.

%setup

    touch ${SINGULARITY_ROOTFS}/tacos.txt

    touch avocados.txt

%files

    avocados.txt

    avocados.txt /opt

%labels

    Maintainer Vanessasaurus

    Version v1.0

The easiest way to see labels is to inspect the image:

$ singularity inspect roar.simg

{

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.deffile.bootstrap": "docker",

    "MAINTAINER": "Vanessasaurus",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.deffile": "Singularity",

    "org.label-schema.usage": "/.singularity.d/runscript.help",

    "org.label-schema.schema-version": "1.0",

    "VERSION": "v1.0",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.deffile.from": "ubuntu",

    "org.label-schema.build-date": "2017-10-02T17:00:23-07:00",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.runscript.help": "/.singularity.d/runscript.help",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.version": "2.3.9-development.g3dafa39",

    "org.label-schema.build-size": "1760MB"

}

You’ll notice some other labels that are captured automatically from the build process. You can read more about labels and metadata here.

%environment¶

As of Singularity 2.3, you can add environment variables to your Singularity Recipe in a section called %environment. Keep in mind that these environment variables are sourced at runtime and not at build time. This means that if you need the same variables during build time, you should also define them in your %post section. Specifically:

during build: the %environment section is written to a file in the container’s metadata folder. This file is not sourced.
during runtime: the file written to the container’s metadata folder is sourced.

Since the file is ultimately sourced, you should generally use the same conventions that you might use in a bashrc or profile. In the example below, the variables VADER and LUKE would not be available during build, but when the container is finished and run:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

%help

Help me. I'm in the container.

%setup

    touch ${SINGULARITY_ROOTFS}/tacos.txt

    touch avocados.txt

%files

    avocados.txt

    avocados.txt /opt

%labels

    Maintainer Vanessasaurus

    Version v1.0

%environment

    VADER=badguy

    LUKE=goodguy

    SOLO=someguy

    export VADER LUKE SOLO

For the rationale behind this approach and why we do not source the %environment section at build time, refer to this issue. When the container is finished, you can easily see environment variables also with inspect, and this is done by showing the file produced above:

$ singularity inspect -e roar.simg # Custom environment shell code should follow

    VADER=badguy

    LUKE=goodguy

    SOLO=someguy

    export VADER LUKE SOLO

or in the case of variables generated at build time, you can add environment variables to your container in the %post section (see below) using the following syntax:

%post

    echo 'export JAWA_SEZ=wutini' >> $SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT

When we rebuild, is it added to the environment?

singularity exec roar.simg env | grep JAWA

JAWA_SEZ=wutini

Where are all these environment variables going? Inside the container is a metadata folder located at /.singularity.d, and a subdirectory env for environment scripts that are sourced. Text in the %environment section is appended to a file called /.singularity.d/env/90-environment.sh. Text redirected to the SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT variable will added to a file called /.singularity.d/env/91-environment.sh. At runtime, scripts in /.singularity/env are sourced in order. This means that variables in $SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT take precedence over those added via %environment. Note that you won’t see these variables in the inspect output, as inspect only shows the contents added from %environment. See Environment and Metadata for more information about the %labels and %environment sections.

%post¶

Commands in the %post section are executed within the container after the base OS has been installed at build time. This is where the meat of your setup will live, including making directories, and installing software and libraries. We will jump from our simple use case to show a more realistic scientific container. Here we are installing yum, openMPI, and other dependencies for a Centos7 bootstrap:

%post

    echo "Installing Development Tools YUM group"

    yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"

    echo "Installing OpenMPI into container..."

    # Here we are at the base, /, of the container

    git clone https://github.com/open-mpi/ompi.git

    # Now at /ompi

    cd ompi

    ./autogen.pl

    ./configure --prefix=/usr/local

    make

    make install

    /usr/local/bin/mpicc examples/ring_c.c -o /usr/bin/mpi_ring

You cannot copy files from the host to your container in this section, but you can of course download with commands like git clone and wget and curl.

%runscript¶

The %runscript is another scriptlet, but it does not get executed during bootstrapping. Instead it gets persisted within the container to a file (or symlink for later versions) called singularity which is the execution driver when the container image is run (either via the singularity run command or via executing the container directly). When the %runscript is executed, all options are passed along to the executing script at runtime, this means that you can (and should) manage argument processing from within your runscript. Here is an example of how to do that, adding to our work in progress:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

%help

Help me. I'm in the container.

%setup

    touch ${SINGULARITY_ROOTFS}/tacos.txt

    touch avocados.txt

%files

    avocados.txt

    avocados.txt /opt

%labels

    Maintainer Vanessasaurus

    Version v1.0

%environment

    VADER=badguy

    LUKE=goodguy

    SOLO=someguy

    export VADER LUKE SOLO

%post

    echo 'export JAWA_SEZ=wutini' >> $SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT

%runscript

    echo "Rooooar!"

    echo "Arguments received: $*"

    exec echo "$@"

In this particular runscript, the arguments are printed as a single string ($*) and then they are passed to echo via a quoted array ($@) which ensures that all of the arguments are properly parsed by the executed command. Using the exec command is like handing off the calling process to the one in the container. The final command (the echo) replaces the current entry in the process table (which originally was the call to Singularity). This makes it so the runscript shell process ceases to exist, and the only process running inside this container is the called echo command. This could easily be another program like python, or an analysis script. Running it, it works as expected:

$ singularity run roar.simg

Rooooar!

Arguments received:

$ singularity run roar.simg one two

Rooooar!

Arguments received: one two

one two

%test¶

You may choose to add a %test section to your definition file. This section will be run at the very end of the build process and will give you a chance to validate the container during the bootstrap process. You can also execute this scriptlet through the container itself, such that you can always test the validity of the container itself as you transport it to different hosts. Extending on the above Open MPI %post, consider this real world example:

%test

    /usr/local/bin/mpirun --allow-run-as-root /usr/bin/mpi_test

This is a simple Open MPI test to ensure that the MPI is build properly and communicates between processes as it should. If you want to build without running tests (for example, if the test needs to be done in a different environment), you can do so with the --notest argument:

$ sudo singularity build --notest mpirun.simg Singularity

This argument is useful in cases where you need hardware that is available during runtime, but is not available on the host that is building the image.

Apps¶

What if you want to build a single container with two or three different apps that each have their own runscripts and custom environments? In some circumstances, it may be redundant to build different containers for each app with almost equivalent dependencies.

Starting in Singularity 2.4 all of the above commands can also be used in the context of internal modules called apps based on the Standard Container Integration Format. For details on apps, see the apps documentation. For a quick rundown of adding an app to your container, here is an example runscript:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

%environment

    VADER=badguy

    LUKE=goodguy

    SOLO=someguy

    export VADER LUKE SOLO

%labels

   Maintainer Vanessasaur

##############################

# foo

##############################

%apprun foo

    exec echo "RUNNING FOO"

%applabels foo

   BESTAPP=FOO

   export BESTAPP

%appinstall foo

   touch foo.exec

%appenv foo

    SOFTWARE=foo

    export SOFTWARE

%apphelp foo

    This is the help for foo.

%appfiles foo

   avocados.txt

##############################

# bar

##############################

%apphelp bar

    This is the help for bar.

%applabels bar

   BESTAPP=BAR

   export BESTAPP

%appinstall bar

    touch bar.exec

%appenv bar

    SOFTWARE=bar

    export SOFTWARE

Importantly, note that the apps can exist alongside any and all of the primary sections (e.g. %post or %runscript ), and the new %appinstall section is the equivalent of %post but for an app. The title sections (######) aren’t necessary or required, they are just comments to show you the different apps. The ordering isn’t important either, you can have any mixture of sections anywhere in the file after the header. The primary difference is now the container can perform any of it’s primary functions in the context of an app:

What apps are installed in the container?

$ singularity apps roar.simg

bar

foo

Help me with bar!

$ singularity help --app bar roar.simg

This is the help for bar.

Run foo

singularity run --app foo roar.simg

RUNNING FOO

Show me the custom environments

Remember how we defined the same environment variable, SOFTWARE for each of foo and bar? We can execute a command to search the list of active environment variables with grep to see if the variable changes depending on the app we specify:

$ singularity exec --app foo roar.simg env | grep SOFTWARE

SOFTWARE=foo

$ singularity exec --app bar roar.simg env | grep SOFTWARE

SOFTWARE=bar

Examples¶

For more examples, for real world scientific recipes we recommend you look at other containers on Singularity Hub. For examples of different bases, look at the examples folder for the most up-to-date examples. For apps, including snippets and tutorial with more walk throughs, see SCI-F Apps Home.

Best Practices for Build Recipes¶

When crafting your recipe, it is best to consider the following:

To make your container internally modular, use SCI-F apps. Shared dependencies (between app modules) can go under %post.
For global installs to %post, install packages, programs, data, and files into operating system locations (e.g. not /home, /tmp , or any other directories that might get commonly binded on).
Make your container speak for itself. If your runscript doesn’t spit out help, write a %help or %post or %apphelp section. A good container tells the user how to interact with it.
If you require any special environment variables to be defined, add them the %environment and %appenv sections of the build recipe.
Files should never be owned by actual users, they should always be owned by a system account (UID less than 500).
Ensure that the container’s /etc/passwd , /etc/group , /etc/shadow , and no other sensitive files have anything but the bare essentials within them.
It is encouraged to build containers from a recipe instead of a sandbox that has been manually changed. This ensures greatest possibility of reproducibility and mitigates the black box effect.

Are you a recipe pro and now ready to build? Take a look at the build documentation.

Singularity Flow¶

This document describes a suggested “best-practices” workflow for building, running, and managing your containers.

There are generally two ways to get images. You either want to pull an image file as is, or (more likely) build your own custom image. We will start with talking about build, and the many different use cases it affords.

Building Images¶

If you read the quick start, you probably remember that building images from a Docker base does not require a Singularity recipe. However, if you do want to build and customize your image, you can create a Singularity recipe text file, which is a simple text file that describes how the container should be made.

The Singularity Flow¶

The diagram below is a visual depiction of how you can use Singularity to build images. The high level idea is that we have two environments:

a build environment (where you have sudo privileges) to test and build your container
a production environment where you run your container

Singularity Workflow

Singularity production images are immutable. This is a feature added as of Singularity 2.4, and it ensures a higher level of reproducibility and verification of images. To read more about the details, check out the build docs. However, immutability is not so great when you are testing, debugging, or otherwise want to quickly change your image. We will proceed by describing a typical workflow of developing first, building a final image, and using it in production.

1. Development Commands¶

If you want a writable image or folder for developing, you have two options:

build into a directory that has writable permissions using the --sandbox option
build into an ext3 image file, that has writable permissions with the --writable option

In both cases you will need to execute your container with the --writable option at runtime for your changes to be persistent.

Sandbox Folder¶

To build into a folder (we call this a “sandbox”) just ask for it:

$ sudo singularity build --sandbox ubuntu/ docker://ubuntu

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /root/.singularity/docker

Importing: base Singularity environment

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:9fb6c798fa41e509b58bccc5c29654c3ff4648b608f5daa67c1aab6a7d02c118.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:3b61febd4aefe982e0cb9c696d415137384d1a01052b50a85aae46439e15e49a.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:9d99b9777eb02b8943c0e72d7a7baec5c782f8fd976825c9d3fb48b3101aacc2.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:d010c8cf75d7eb5d2504d5ffa0d19696e8d745a457dd8d28ec6dd41d3763617e.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:7fac07fb303e0589b9c23e6f49d5dc1ff9d6f3c8c88cabe768b430bdb47f03a9.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/metadata/sha256:22e289880847a9a2f32c62c237d2f7e3f4eae7259bf1d5c7ec7ffa19c1a483c8.tar.gz

Building image from sandbox: ubuntu/

Singularity container built: ubuntu/

We now have a folder with the entire ubuntu OS, plus some Singularity metadata, plopped in our present working directory.

 $ tree -L 1 ubuntu

ubuntu

├── bin

├── boot

├── dev

├── environment -> .singularity.d/env/90-environment.sh

├── etc

├── home

├── lib

├── lib64

├── media

├── mnt

├── opt

├── proc

├── root

├── run

├── sbin

├── singularity -> .singularity.d/runscript

├── srv

├── sys

├── tmp

├── usr

└── var

And you can shell into it just like a normal container.

$ singularity shell ubuntu

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity ubuntu:~/Desktop> touch /hello.txt

touch: cannot touch '/hello.txt': Permission denied

You can make changes to the container (assuming you have the proper permissions to do so) but those changes will disappear as soon as you exit. To make your changes persistent across sessions, use the --writable option. It’s also a good practice to shell into your container as root to ensure you have permissions to write where you like.

$ sudo singularity shell ubuntu

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity ubuntu:/home/vanessa/Desktop> touch /hello.txt

Writable Image¶

If you prefer to work with a writable image file rather than a directory, you can perform a similar development build and specify the --writable option. This will produce an image that is writable with an ext3 file system. Unlike the sandbox, it is a single image file.

$ sudo singularity build --writable ubuntu.img docker://ubuntu

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /root/.singularity/docker

Importing: base Singularity environment

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:9fb6c798fa41e509b58bccc5c29654c3ff4648b608f5daa67c1aab6a7d02c118.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:3b61febd4aefe982e0cb9c696d415137384d1a01052b50a85aae46439e15e49a.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:9d99b9777eb02b8943c0e72d7a7baec5c782f8fd976825c9d3fb48b3101aacc2.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:d010c8cf75d7eb5d2504d5ffa0d19696e8d745a457dd8d28ec6dd41d3763617e.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:7fac07fb303e0589b9c23e6f49d5dc1ff9d6f3c8c88cabe768b430bdb47f03a9.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/metadata/sha256:22e289880847a9a2f32c62c237d2f7e3f4eae7259bf1d5c7ec7ffa19c1a483c8.tar.gz

Building image from sandbox: /tmp/.singularity-build.VCHPpP

Creating empty Singularity writable container 130MB

Creating empty 162MiB image file: ubuntu.img

Formatting image with ext3 file system

Image is done: ubuntu.img

Building Singularity image...

Cleaning up...

Singularity container built: ubuntu.img

You can use this image with commands like shell, exec , run , and if you want to change the image you must use the --writable flag. As before, it’s a good idea to issue these commands as root to ensure you have the proper permissions to write.

$ sudo singularity shell --writable ubuntu.img

Development Tip! When building containers, it often is the case that

you will have a lot of testing of installation commands, and if

building a production image, one error will stop the entire build.

If you interactively write the build recipe with one of these

writable containers, you can debug as you go, and then build the

production (squashfs) container without worrying that it will error

and need to be started again.

2. Production Commands¶

Let’s set the scene - we just finished building our perfect hello world container. It does a fantastic hello-world analysis, and we have written a paper on it! We now want to build an immutable container - meaning that if someone obtained our container and tried to change it, they could not. They could easily use the same recipe that you used (it is provided as metadata inside the container), or convert your container to one of the writable formats above using build . So your work can still be extended.

Recommended Production Build¶

What we want for production is a build into a squashfs image . Squashfs is a read only, and compressed filesystem, and well suited for confident archive and re-use of your hello-world. To build a production image, just remove the extra options:

sudo singularity build ubuntu.simg docker://ubuntu

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /root/.singularity/docker

Importing: base Singularity environment

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:9fb6c798fa41e509b58bccc5c29654c3ff4648b608f5daa67c1aab6a7d02c118.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:3b61febd4aefe982e0cb9c696d415137384d1a01052b50a85aae46439e15e49a.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:9d99b9777eb02b8943c0e72d7a7baec5c782f8fd976825c9d3fb48b3101aacc2.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:d010c8cf75d7eb5d2504d5ffa0d19696e8d745a457dd8d28ec6dd41d3763617e.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/docker/sha256:7fac07fb303e0589b9c23e6f49d5dc1ff9d6f3c8c88cabe768b430bdb47f03a9.tar.gz

Importing: /root/.singularity/metadata/sha256:22e289880847a9a2f32c62c237d2f7e3f4eae7259bf1d5c7ec7ffa19c1a483c8.tar.gz

Building Singularity image...

Cleaning up...

Singularity container built: ubuntu.simg

Production Build from Sandbox¶

We understand that it might be wanted to build a Singularity (squashfs) from a previous development image. While we advocate for the first approach, we support this use case. To do this, given our folder called “ubuntu/” we made above:

sudo singularity build ubuntu.simg ubuntu/

It could be the case that a cluster maintains a “working” base of container folders (with writable) and then builds and provides production containers to its users.

If you want to go through this entire process without having singularity installed locally, or without leaving your cluster, you can build images using Singularity Hub.

Bind Paths and Mounts¶

If enabled by the system administrator, Singularity allows you to map directories on your host system to directories within your container using bind mounts. This allows you to read and write data on the host system with ease.

Overview¶

When Singularity ‘swaps’ the host operating system for the one inside your container, the host file systems becomes inaccessible. But you may want to read and write files on the host system from within the container. To enable this functionality, Singularity will bind directories back in via two primary methods: system-defined bind points and conditional user-defined bind points.

System-defined bind points¶

The system administrator has the ability to define what bind points will be included automatically inside each container. The bind paths are locations on the host’s root file system which should also be visible within the container. Some of the bind paths are automatically derived (e.g. a user’s home directory) and some are statically defined (e.g. bind path in the Singularity configuration file). In the default configuration, the directories $HOME , /tmp , /proc , /sys , /dev and are among the system-defined bind points.

User-defined bind points¶

If the system administrator has enabled user control of binds, you will be able to request your own bind points within your container.

To mount a bind path inside the container, a bind point must be defined within the container. The bind point is a directory within the container that Singularity can use to bind a directory on the host system. This means that if you want to bind to a point within the container such as /global, that directory must already exist within the container.

It is, however, possible that the system administrator has enabled a Singularity feature called overlay in the Singularity configuration file. This will cause the bind points to be created on an as-needed basis in an overlay file system so that the underlying container is not modified. But because the overlay feature is not always enabled or is unavailable in the kernels of some older host systems, it may be necessary for container standards to exist to ensure portability from host to host.

Specifying Bind Paths¶

Many of the Singularity commands such as run, exec , and shell take the --bind / command-line option to specify bind paths, in addition to the SINGULARITY_BINDPATH environment variable. This option’s argument is a comma-delimited string of bind path specifications in the format src[:dest[:opts]], where src and dest are outside and inside paths. If dest is not given, it is set equal to src . Mount options (opts) may be specified as ro (read-only) or rw (read/write, which is the default). The --bind/-B option can be specified multiple times, or a comma-delimited string of bind path specifications can be used.

Here’s an example of using the -B option and binding /tmp on the host to /scratch in the container (/scratch does not need to already exist in the container if file system overlay is enabled):

$ singularity shell -B /tmp:/scratch /tmp/Centos7-ompi.img

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity.Centos7-ompi.img> ls /scratch

ssh-7vywtVeOez  systemd-private-cd84c81dda754fe4a7a593647d5a5765-ntpd.service-12nMO4

You can bind multiple directories in a single command with this syntax:

$ singularity shell -B /opt,/data:/mnt /tmp/Centos7-ompi.img

This will bind /opt on the host to /opt in the container and /data on the host to /mnt in the container. Using the environment variable instead of the command line argument, this would be:

$ export SINGULARITY_BINDPATH="/opt,/data:/mnt"

$ singularity shell /tmp/Centos7-ompi.img

Using the environment variable $SINGULARITY_BINDPATH, you can bind directories even when you are running your container as an executable file with a runscript. If you bind many directories into your Singularity containers and they don’t change, you could even benefit by setting this variable in your .bashrc file.

Binding with Overlay¶

If a bind path is requested and the bind point does not exist within the container, a warning message will be displayed and Singularity will continue trying to start the container. For example:

$ singularity shell --bind /global /tmp/Centos7-ompi.img

WARNING: Non existent bind point (directory) in container: '/global'

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity.Centos7-ompi.img>

Even though /global did not exist inside the container, the shell command printed a warning but continued on. If overlay is available and enabled, you will find that we no longer get the error and /global is created and accessible as expected:

$ singularity shell --bind /global /tmp/Centos7-ompi.img

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity.Centos7-ompi.img>

In this case, Singularity dynamically created the necessary bind point in your container. Without overlay, you would have needed to manually create the /global directory inside your container.

Persistent Overlays¶

Persistent overlay images are new to version 2.4! This feature allows you to overlay a writable file system on an immutable read-only container for the illusion of read-write access.

Overview¶

A persistent overlay is an image that “sits on top” of your compressed, immutable squashfs container. When you install new software or create and modify files the overlay image stores the changes.

In Singularity versions 2.4 and later an overlay file system is automatically added to your squashfs or sandbox container when it is mounted. This means you can install new software and create and modify files even though your container is read-only. But your changes will disappear as soon as you exit the container.

If you want your changes to persist in your container across uses, you can create a writable image to use as a persistent overlay. Then you can specify that you want to use the image as an overlay at runtime with the --overlay option.

You can use a persistent overlays with the following commands:

run
exec
shell
instance.start

Usage¶

To use a persistent overlay, you must first have a container.

$ singularity build ubuntu.simg shub://GodloveD/ubuntu

Then you must create a writable, ext3 image. We can do so with the image.create command:

$ singularity image.create my-overlay.img

Now you can use this overlay image with your container. Note that it is not necessary to be root to use an overlay partition, but this will ensure that we have write privileges where we want them.

$ sudo singularity shell --overlay my-overlay.img ubuntu.simg

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> touch /foo

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> apt-get install -y vim

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> which vim

/usr/bin/vim

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> exit

You will find that your changes persist across sessions as though you were using a writable container.

$ sudo singularity shell --overlay my-overlay.img ubuntu.simg

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> ls /foo

/foo

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> which vim

/usr/bin/vim

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> exit

If you mount your container without the --overlay option, your changes will be gone.

$ sudo singularity shell ubuntu.simg

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> ls /foo

ls: cannot access 'foo': No such file or directory

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> which vim

Singularity ubuntu.simg:~> exit

Running Services¶

Singularity 2.4 introduces the ability to run “container instances”, allowing you to run services (e.g. Nginx, MySQL, etc…) using Singularity. A container instance, simply put, is a persistent and isolated version of the container image that runs in the background.

Why container instances?¶

that is pretty simple, I install nginx and start the service:

apt-get update && apt-get install -y nginx

service nginx start

With older versions of Singularity, if you were to do something like this, from inside the container you would happily see the service start, and the web server running! But then if you were to log out of the container what would happen? Orphan process within unreachable namespaces! You would lose control of the process. It would still be running, but you couldn’t easily kill or interface with it. This is a called an orphan process. Singularity versions less than 2.4 were not designed to handle running services properly.

Container Instances in Singularity¶

With Singularity 2.4 and the addition of container instances, the ability to cleanly, reliably, and safely run services in a container is here. First, let’s put some commands that we want our instance to execute into a script. Let’s call it a startscript. This fits into a definition file like so:

%startscript

service nginx start

Now let’s say we build a container with that startscript into an image called nginx.img and we want to run an nginx service. All we need to do is start the instance with the instance.start command, and the startscript will run inside the container automatically:

              [command]        [image]    [name of instance]

$ singularity instance.start   nginx.img  web

When we run that command, Singularity creates an isolated environment for the container instances’ processes/services to live inside. We can confirm that this command started an instance by running the instance.list command like so:

$ singularity instance.list

INSTANCE NAME    PID      CONTAINER IMAGE

web              790      /home/mibauer/nginx.img

If we want to run multiple instances from the same image, it’s as simple as running the command multiple times. The instance names are an identifier used to uniquely describe an instance, so they cannot be repeated.

$ singularity instance.start   nginx.img  web1

$ singularity instance.start   nginx.img  web2

$ singularity instance.start   nginx.img  web3

And again to confirm that the instances are running as we expected:

$ singularity instance.list

INSTANCE NAME    PID      CONTAINER IMAGE

web1             790      /home/mibauer/nginx.img

web2             791      /home/mibauer/nginx.img

web3             792      /home/mibauer/nginx.img

If the service you want to run in your instance requires a bind mount, then you must pass the -B option when calling instance.start. For example, if you wish to capture the output of the web1 container instance which is placed at /output/ inside the container you could do:

$ singularity instance.start -B output/dir/outside/:/output/ nginx.img  web1

If you want to poke around inside of your instance, you can do a normal singularity shell command, but give it the instance URI:

$ singularity shell instance://web1

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity pdf_server.img:~/>

Similarly, you can use the singularity run/exec commands on instances:

$ singularity run instance://web1

$ singularity exec instance://web1 ps -ef

When using run with an instance URI, the runscript will be executed inside of the instance. Similarly with exec, it will execute the given command in the instance.

When you are finished with your instance you can clean it up with the instance.stop command like so:

$ singularity instance.stop web1

If you have multiple instances running and you want to stop all of them, you can do so with a wildcard or the -a flag:

$ singularity instance.stop \*

$ singularity instance.stop -a

Note

Note that you must escape the wildcard with a backslash like this \* to pass it properly.

Nginx “Hello-world” in Singularity¶

Let’s take a look at setting up a sample nginx web server using instances in Singularity. First we will just create a basic definition file:

Bootstrap: docker

From: nginx

Includecmd: no

%startscript

    nginx

All this does is download the official nginx Docker container, convert it to a Singularity image, and tell it to run nginx when you start the instance. Since we’re running a web server, we’re going to run the following commands as root.

# singularity build nginx.img Singularity

# singularity instance.start nginx.img web1

Just like that we’ve downloaded, built, and ran an nginx Singularity image. And to confirm that it’s correctly running:

$ curl localhost

127.0.0.1 - - [06/Oct/2017:21:46:43 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 612 "-" "curl/7.47.0" "-"

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>Welcome to nginx!</title>

<style>

    body {

        width: 35em;

        margin: 0 auto;

        font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;

    }

</style>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Welcome to nginx!</h1>

<p>If you see this page, the nginx web server is successfully installed and

working. Further configuration is required.</p>

<p>For online documentation and support please refer to

<a href="http://nginx.org/">nginx.org</a>.<br/>

Commercial support is available at

<a href="http://nginx.com/">nginx.com</a>.</p>

<p><em>Thank you for using nginx.</em></p>

</body>

</html>

Putting all together¶

In this section, we will demonstrate an example of packaging a service into a container and running it. The service we will be packaging is an API server that converts a web page into a PDF, and can be found here. The final example can be found here on GitHub. If you wish to just download the final image directly from Singularity Hub, simply run singularity pull shub://bauerm97/instance-example.

Building the image¶

To begin, we need to build the image. When looking at the GitHub page of the url-to-pdf-api, we can see that it is a Node 8 server that uses headless Chromium called Puppeteer. Let’s first choose a base from which to build our container, in this case I used the docker image node:8 which comes pre-installed with Node 8:

Bootstrap: docker

From: node:8

Includecmd: no

Puppeteer also requires a few dependencies to be manually installed in addition to Node 8, so we can add those into the post section as well as the installation script for the url-to-pdf-api:

%post

     apt-get update

     apt-get install -yq gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 \

     libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgcc1 libgconf-2-4 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 \

     libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 \

     libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 \

     libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 ca-certificates \

     fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget curl

     rm -r /var/lib/apt/lists/*

     cd /

     git clone https://github.com/alvarcarto/url-to-pdf-api.git pdf_server

     cd pdf_server

     npm install

     chmod -R 0755 .

And now we need to define what happens when we start an instance of the container. In this situation, we want to run the commands that starts up the url-to-pdf-api server:

%startscript

    cd /pdf_server

    # Use nohup and /dev/null to completely detach server process from terminal

    nohup npm start > /dev/null 2>&1 < /dev/null &

Also, the url-to-pdf-api server requires environment some variables be set, which we can do in the environment section:

%environment

    NODE_ENV=development

    PORT=8000

    ALLOW_HTTP=true

    URL=localhost

    export NODE_ENV PORT ALLOW_HTTP URL

Now we can build the definition file into an image! Simply run build and the image will be ready to go:

$ sudo singularity build url-to-pdf-api.img Singularity

Running the Server¶

Now that we have an image, we are ready to start an instance and run the server:

$ singularity instance.start url-to-pdf-api.img pdf

We can confirm it’s working by sending the server an http request using curl:

$ curl -o google.pdf localhost:8000/api/render?url=http://google.com

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current

                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed

100 51664  100 51664    0     0  12443      0  0:00:04  0:00:04 --:--:-- 12446

If you shell into the instance, you can see the running processes:

$ singularity shell instance://pdf

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity pdf_server.img:~/bauerm97/instance-example> ps auxf

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND

node        87  0.2  0.0  20364  3384 pts/0    S    16:16   0:00 /bin/bash --norc

node        88  0.0  0.0  17496  2144 pts/0    R+   16:16   0:00  \_ ps auxf

node         1  0.0  0.0  13968  1904 ?        Ss   16:10   0:00 singularity-instance: mibauer [pdf]

node         3  0.1  0.4 997452 40364 ?        Sl   16:10   0:00 npm

node        13  0.0  0.0   4340   724 ?        S    16:10   0:00  \_ sh -c nodemon --watch ./src -e j

node        14  0.0  0.4 1184492 37008 ?       Sl   16:10   0:00      \_ node /scif/apps/pdf_server/p

node        26  0.0  0.0   4340   804 ?        S    16:10   0:00          \_ sh -c node src/index.js

node        27  0.2  0.5 906108 43424 ?        Sl   16:10   0:00              \_ node src/index.js

Singularity pdf_server.img:~/bauerm97/instance-example> ls

LICENSE  README.md  Singularity  out  pdf_server.img

Singularity pdf_server.img:~/bauerm97/instance-example> exit

Making it Pretty¶

Now that we have confirmation that the server is working, let’s make it a little cleaner. It’s difficult to remember the exact curl command and URL syntax each time you want to request a PDF, so let’s automate that. To do that, we’re going to be using Standard Container Integration Format (SCIF) apps, which are integrated directly into singularity. If you haven’t already, check out the Singularity app documentation to come up to speed.

First off, we’re going to move the installation of the url-to-pdf-api into an app, so that there is a designated spot to place output files. To do that, we want to add a section to our definition file to build the server:

%appinstall pdf_server

    git clone https://github.com/alvarcarto/url-to-pdf-api.git pdf_server

    cd pdf_server

    npm install

    chmod -R 0755 .

And update our startscript to point to the app location:

%startscript

    cd "${APPROOT_pdf_server}/pdf_server"

    # Use nohup and /dev/null to completely detach server process from terminal

    nohup npm start > /dev/null 2>&1 < /dev/null &

Now we want to define the pdf_client app, which we will run to send the requests to the server:

%apprun pdf_client

    if [ -z "${1:-}" ]; then

        echo "Usage: singularity run --app pdf <instance://name> <URL> [output file]"

        exit 1

    fi

    curl -o "${SINGULARITY_APPDATA}/output/${2:-output.pdf}" "${URL}:${PORT}/api/render?url=${1}"

As you can see, the pdf_client app checks to make sure that the user provides at least one argument. Now that we have an output directory in the container, we need to expose it to the host using a bind mount. Once we’ve rebuilt the container, make a new directory callout out for the generated PDF’s to go. Now we simply start the instance like so:

$ singularity instance.start -B out/:/scif/data/pdf_client/output/ url-to-pdf-api.img pdf

And to request a pdf simply do:

$ singularity run --app pdf_client instance://pdf http://google.com google.pdf

And to confirm that it worked:

$ ls out/

google.pdf

When you are finished, use the instance.stop command to close all running instances.

$ singularity instance.stop \*

Important Notes¶

Container Checks¶

New to Singularity 2.4 is the ability to run container “checks” on demand. Checks can be anything from a filter for sensitive information, to an analysis of installed binaries. A few default checks are installed with Singularity and others can be added by the administrator. Users can perform checks at build time or on demand: Perform all default checks, these are the same

$ singularity check ubuntu.img

$ singularity check --tag default ubuntu.img

Perform checks with tag “clean”

$ singularity check --tag clean ubuntu.img

Tags and Organization¶

Currently, checks are organized by tag and security level. If you know a specific tag that you want to use, for example “docker” deploys checks for containers with Docker imported layers, you can specify the tag:

USAGE

    -t/--tag       tag to filter checks. default is "default"

                      Available: default, security, docker, clean

EXAMPLE

$ singularity check --tag docker ubuntu.img

If you want to run checks associated with a different security level, you can specify with --low , --med , or --high :

USAGE: singularity [...] check [exec options...] <container path>

This command will run security checks for an image.

Note that some checks require sudo.

    -l/--low       Specify low threshold (all checks, default)

    -m/--med       Perform medium and high checks

    -h/--high      Perform only checks at level high

Note

Note that some checks will require sudo, and you will be alerted if this is the case and you didn’t use it. Finally, if you want to run all default checks, just don’t specify a tag or level.

What checks are available?¶

Currently, you can view all installable checks here, and we anticipate adding an ability to view tags that are available, along with your own custom checks. You should also ask your administration if new checks have been added not supported by Singularity. If you want to request adding a new check, please tell us!.

Environment and Metadata¶

Singularity containers support environment variables and labels that you can add to your container during the build process. This page details general information about defining environments and labels. If you are looking for specific environment variables for build time, see build environment.

Environment¶

If you build a container from Singularity Hub or Docker Hub, the environment will be included with the container at build time. You can also define custom environment variables in your Recipe file like so:

Bootstrap: shub

From: vsoch/hello-world

%environment

    VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE

    export VARIABLE_NAME

You may need to add environment variables to your container during the %post section. For instance, maybe you will not know the appropriate value of a variable until you have installed some software. To add variables to the environment during %post you can use the $SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT variable with the following syntax:

%post

    echo 'export VARIABLE_NAME=VARIABLE_VALUE' >>$SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT

Text in the %environment section will be appended to the file /.singularity.d/env/90-environment.sh while text redirected to $SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT will end up in the file /.singularity.d/env/91-environment.sh.

Because files in /.singularity.d/env are sourced in alpha-numerical order, this means that variables added using $SINGULARITY_ENVIRONMENT take precedence over those added via the %environment section.

Need to define a variable at runtime? You can set variables inside the container by prefixing them with SINGULARITYENV_. They will be transposed automatically and the prefix will be stripped. For example, let’s say we want to set the variable HELLO to have value WORLD. We can do that as follows:

$ SINGULARITYENV_HELLO=WORLD singularity exec --cleanenv centos7.img env

HELLO=WORLD

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib64

SINGULARITY_NAME=test.img

PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

PWD=/home/gmk/git/singularity

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

SHLVL=0

SINGULARITY_INIT=1

SINGULARITY_CONTAINER=test.img

Notice the --cleanenv in the example above? That argument specifies that we want to remove the host environment from the container. If we remove the --cleanenv, we will still pass forward HELLO=WORLD, and the list shown above, but we will also pass forward all the other environment variables from the host.

If you need to change the $PATH of your container at runtime there are a few environmental variables you can use:

SINGULARITYENV_PREPEND_PATH=/good/stuff/at/beginning to prepend directories to the beginning of the
SINGULARITYENV_APPEND_PATH=/good/stuff/at/end to append directories to the end of the
SINGULARITYENV_PATH=/a/new/path to override the $PATH within the container

Labels¶

Your container stores metadata about it’s build, along with Docker labels, and custom labels that you define during build in a %labels section.

For containers that are generated with Singularity version 2.4 and later, labels are represented using the rc1 Label Schema. For example:

$ singularity inspect dino.img

{

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.deffile.bootstrap": "docker",

    "MAINTAINER": "Vanessasaurus",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.deffile": "Singularity.help",

    "org.label-schema.usage": "/.singularity.d/runscript.help",

    "org.label-schema.schema-version": "1.0",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.deffile.from": "ubuntu:latest",

    "org.label-schema.build-date": "2017-07-28T22:59:17-04:00",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.runscript.help": "/.singularity.d/runscript.help",

    "org.label-schema.usage.singularity.version": "2.3.1-add/label-schema.g00f040f",

    "org.label-schema.build-size": "715MB"

}

You will notice that the one label doesn’t belong to the label schema, MAINTAINER . This was a user provided label during bootstrap. Finally, for Singularity versions >= 2.4, the image build size is added as a label, org.label-schema.build-size, and the label schema is used throughout. For versions earlier than 2.4, containers did not use the label schema, and looked like this:

singularity exec centos7.img cat /.singularity.d/labels.json

{ "name":

      "CentOS Base Image",

       "build-date": "20170315",

       "vendor": "CentOS",

       "license": "GPLv2"

}

You can add custom labels to your container in a bootstrap file:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu: latest

%labels

AUTHOR Vanessasaur

The inspect command is useful for viewing labels and other container meta-data.

Container Metadata¶

Inside of the container, metadata is stored in the /.singularity.d directory. You probably shouldn’t edit any of these files directly but it may be helpful to know where they are and what they do:

/.singularity.d/

├── actions

│   ├── exec

│   ├── run

│   ├── shell

│   ├── start

│   └── test

├── env

│   ├── 01-base.sh

│   ├── 90-environment.sh

│   ├── 95-apps.sh

│   └── 99-base.sh

├── labels.json

├── libs

├── runscript

├── Singularity

└── startscript

actions: This directory contains helper scripts to allow the container to carry out the action commands.
env: All *.sh files in this directory are sourced in alpha-numeric order when the container is initiated. For legacy purposes there is a symbolic link called /environment that points to /.singularity.d/env/90-environment.sh.
labels.json: The json file that stores a containers labels described above.
libs: At runtime the user may request some host-system libraries to be mapped into the container (with the --nv option for example). If so, this is their destination.
runscript: The commands in this file will be executed when the container is invoked with the run command or called as an executable. For legacy purposes there is a symbolic link called /singularity that points to this file
Singularity: This is the Recipe file that was used to generate the container. If more than 1 Recipe file was used to generate the container additional Singularity files will appear in numeric order in a sub-directory called bootstrap_history
startscript: The commands in this file will be executed when the container is invoked with the instance.start command.

Reproducible SCI-F Apps¶

Why do we need SCI-F?¶

The Scientific Filesystem (SCIF) provides internal modularity of containers, and it makes it easy for the creator to give the container implied metadata about software. For example, installing a set of libraries, defining environment variables, or adding labels that belong to app foo makes a strong assertion that those dependencies belong to foo . When I run foo, I can be confident that the container is running in this context, meaning with foo's custom environment, and with foo's libraries and executables on the path. This is drastically different from serving many executables in a single container, because there is no way to know which are associated with which of the container’s intended functions. This documentation will walk through some rationale, background, and examples of the SCIF integration for Singularity containers. For other examples (and a client that works across container technologies) see the the scientific filesystem. This page will primarily cover the native Singularity SCIF integration.

To start, let’s take a look at this series of steps to install dependencies for software foo and bar.

%post

# install dependencies 1

# install software A (foo)

# install software B (bar)

# install software C (foo)

# install software D (bar)

The creator may know that A and C were installed for foo and B and D for bar , but down the road, when someone discovers the container, if they can find the software at all, the intention of the container creator would be lost. As many are now, containers without any form of internal organization and predictability are black boxes. We don’t know if some software installed to /opt , or to /usr/local/bin , or to their custom favorite folder /code . We could assume that the creator added important software to the path and look in these locations, but that approach is still akin to fishing in a swamp. We might only hope that the container’s main function, the Singularity runscript, is enough to make the container perform as intended.

Mixed up Modules¶

If your container truly runs one script, the traditional model of a runscript fits well. Even in the case of having two functions like foo and bar you probably have something like this.

%runscript

if some logic to choose foo:

   check arguments for foo

   run foo

else if some logic to choose bar:

   run bar

and maybe your environment looks like this:

%environment

    BEST_GUY=foo

    export BEST_GUY

but what if you run into this issue, with foo and bar?

%environment

    BEST_GUY=foo

    BEST_GUY=bar

    export BEST_GUY

You obviously can’t have them at separate times. You’d have to source some custom environment file (that you make on your own) and it gets hard easily with issues of using shell and sourcing. We don’t know who the best guy is! You probably get the general idea. Without internal organization and modularity:

You have to do a lot of manual work to expose the different software to the user via a custom runscript (and be a generally decent programmer).
All software must share the same metadata, environment, and labels.

Under these conditions, containers are at best block boxes with unclear delineation between software provided, and only one context of running anything. The container creator shouldn’t need to spend inordinate amounts of time writing custom runscripts to support multiple functions and inputs. Each of foo and bar should be easy to define, and have its own runscript, environment, labels, tests and help section.

Container Transparency¶

SCI-F Apps make foo and bar transparent, and solve this problem of mixed up modules. Our simple issue of mixed up modules could be solved if we could do this:

Bootstrap:docker

From: ubuntu:16.04

%appenv foo

    BEST_GUY=foo

    export BEST_GUY

%appenv bar

    BEST_GUY=bar

    export BEST_GUY

%apprun foo

    echo The best guy is $BEST_GUY

%apprun bar

    echo The best guy is $BEST_GUY

Generate the container

$ sudo singularity build foobar.simg Singularity

and run it in the context of foo and then bar

$ singularity run --app bar foobar.simg

The best guy is bar

$ singularity run --app foo foobar.simg

The best guy is foo

Using SCI-F apps, a user can easily discover both foo and bar without knowing anything about the container:

singularity apps foobar.simg

bar

foo

and inspect each one:

singularity inspect --app foo  foobar.simg

{

    "SCIF_APP_NAME": "foo",

    "SCIF_APP_SIZE": "1MB"

}

Container Modularity¶

What is going on, under the hood? Just a simple, clean organization that is tied to a set of sections in the build recipe relevant to each app. For example, I can specify custom install procedures (and they are relevant to each app’s specific base defined under /scif/apps), labels, tests, and help sections. Before I tell you about the sections, I’ll briefly show you what the organization looks like, for each app:

/scif/apps/

     foo/

        bin/

        lib/

        scif/

            runscript.help

            runscript

            env/

                01-base.sh

                90-environment.sh

     bar/

     ....

If you are familiar with Singularity, the above will look very familiar. It mirrors the Singularity (main container) metadata folder, except instead of .singularity.d we have scif. The name and base scif is chosen intentionally to be something short, and likely to be unique. On the level of organization and metadata, these internal apps are like little containers! Are you worried that you need to remember all this path nonsense? Don’t worry, you don’t. You can just use environment variables in your runscripts, etc. Here we are looking at the environment active for lolcat:

singularity exec --app foo foobar.simg env | grep foo

Let’s talk about the output of the above in sections, you will notice some interesting things! First, notice that the app’s bin has been added to the path, and it’s lib added to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH . This means that anything you drop in either will automatically be added. You don’t need to make these folders either, they are created for you.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/scif/apps/foo/lib::/.singularity.d/libs

PATH=/scif/apps/foo/bin:/scif/apps/foo:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

Next, notice that we have environment variables relevant to the active app’s (foo) data and metadata. They look like this:

SCIF_APPOUTPUT=/scif/data/foo/output

SCIF_APPDATA=/scif/data/foo

SCIF_APPINPUT=/scif/data/foo/input

SCIF_APPMETA=/scif/apps/foo/scif

SCIF_APPROOT=/scif/apps/foo

SCIF_APPNAME=foo

We also have foo’s environment variables defined under %appenv foo , and importantly, we don’t see bar’s.

BEST_GUY=foo

Also provided are more global paths for data and apps:

SCIF_APPS=/scif/apps

SCIF_DATA=/scif/data

Importantly, each app has its own modular location. When you do an %appinstall foo, the commands are all done in context of that base. The bin and lib are also automatically generated. So what would be a super simple app?

Just add a script and name it:

%appfiles foo

    runfoo.sh   bin/runfoo.sh

and then maybe for install I’d make it executable

%appinstall foo

    chmod u+x bin/runfoo.sh

You don’t even need files! You could just do this.

%appinstall foo

    echo 'echo "Hello Foo."' >> bin/runfoo.sh

    chmod u+x bin/runfoo.sh

We can summarize these observations about using apps:

the specific environment (%appenv_foo) is active because BEST_APP is foo
the lib folder in foo’s base is added to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH
the bin folder is added to the path
locations for input, output, and general data are exposed. It’s up to you how you use these, but you can predictably know that a well made app will look for inputs and outputs in it’s specific folder.
environment variables are provided for the app’s root, it’s data, and it’s name

Sections¶

Finding the section %appinstall , %apphelp , or %apprun is indication of an application command. The following string is parsed as the name of the application, and this folder is created, in lowercase, under /scif/apps if it doesn’t exist. A singularity metadata folder, .singularity.d, equivalent to the container’s main folder, is generated inside the application. An application thus is like a smaller image inside of it’s parent. Specifically, SCI-F defines the following new sections for the build recipe, where each is optional for 0 or more apps:

%appinstall corresponds to executing commands within the folder to install the application. These commands would previously belong in %post, but are now attributable to the application.

%apphelp is written as a file called runscript.help in the application’s metadata folder, where the Singularity software knows where to find it. If no help section is provided, the software simply will alert the user and show the files provided for inspection.

%apprun is also written as a file called runscript.exec in the application’s metadata folder, and again looked for when the user asks to run the software. If not found, the container should default to shelling into that location.

%applabels will write a labels.json in the application’s metadata folder, allowing for application specific labels.

%appenv will write an environment file in the application’s base folder, allowing for definition of application specific environment variables.

%apptest will run tests specific to the application, with present working directory assumed to be the software module’s folder

%appfiles will add files to the app’s base at /scif/apps/<app>

Interaction¶

I didn’t show you the complete output of a grep to the environment when running foo in the first example - because the remainder of variables are more fit for a discussion about app interaction. Essentially, when any app is active, we also have named variable that can explicitly reference the environment file, labels file, runscript, lib and bin folders for all app’s in the container. For our above Singularity Recipe, we would also find:

SCIF_APPDATA_bar=/scif/data/bar

SCIF_APPRUN_bar=/scif/apps/bar/scif/runscript

SCIF_APPROOT_bar=/scif/apps/bar

SCIF_APPLIB_bar=/scif/apps/bar/lib

SCIF_APPMETA_bar=/scif/apps/bar/scif

SCIF_APPBIN_bar=/scif/apps/bar/bin

SCIF_APPENV_bar=/scif/apps/bar/scif/env/90-environment.sh

SCIF_APPLABELS_bar=/scif/apps/bar/scif/labels.json

SCIF_APPENV_foo=/scif/apps/foo/scif/env/90-environment.sh

SCIF_APPLABELS_foo=/scif/apps/foo/scif/labels.json

SCIF_APPDATA_foo=/scif/data/foo

SCIF_APPRUN_foo=/scif/apps/foo/scif/runscript

SCIF_APPROOT_foo=/scif/apps/foo

SCIF_APPLIB_foo=/scif/apps/foo/lib

SCIF_APPMETA_foo=/scif/apps/foo/scif

SCIF_APPBIN_foo=/scif/apps/foo/bin

This is really great because it means that we can have apps interact with one another internally. For example, let’s modify the recipe a bit:

Bootstrap:docker

From: ubuntu:16.04

%appenv cow

    ANIMAL=COW

    NOISE=moo

    export ANIMAL NOISE

%appenv bird

    NOISE=tweet

    ANIMAL=BIRD

    export ANIMAL

%apprun moo

    echo The ${ANIMAL} goes ${NOISE}

%appenv moo

    . ${APPENV_cow}

In the above example, we have three apps. One for a cow, one for a bird, and a third that depends on the cow. We can’t define global functions or environment variables (in %post or /environment , respectively) because they would interfere with the third app, bird, that has equivalently named variables. What we do then, is source the environment for “cow” in the environment for “moo” and the result is what we would want:

$ singularity run --app moo /tmp/one.simg

The COW goes moo

The same is true for each of the labels, environment, runscript, bin, and lib. The following variables are available to you, for each app in the container, whenever any app is being run:

**SCIF_APPBIN_*: the path to the bin folder, if you want to add an app that isn’t active to your ‘PATH‘
**SCIF_APPLIB_*: the path to the lib folder, if you want to add an app that isn’t active to your ‘LD_LIBRARY_PATH‘
**SCIF_APPRUN_*: the app’s runscript (so you can call it from elsewhere)
**SCIF_APPMETA_*: the path to the metadata folder for the app
**SCIF_APPENV_*: the path to the primary environment file (for sourcing) if it exists
**SCIF_APPROOT_*: the app’s install folder
**SCIF_APPDATA_*: the app’s data folder
**SCIF_APPLABELS_*: The path to the label.json in the metadata folder, if it exists

Singularity containers are already reproducible in that they package dependencies. This basic format adds to that by making the software inside of them modular, predictable, and programmatically accessible. We can say confidently that some set of steps, labels, or variables in the runscript is associated with a particular action of the container. We can better reveal how dependencies relate to each step in a scientific workflow. Making containers is not easy. When a scientist starts to write a recipe for his set of tools, he probably doesn’t know where to put it, perhaps that a help file should exist, or that metadata about the software should be served by the container. If container generation software made it easy to organize and capture container content automatically, we would easily meet these goals of internal modularity and consistency, and generate containers that easily integrate with external hosts, data, and other containers. These are essential components for (ultimately) optimizing the way we develop, understand, and execute our scientific containers.

Cowsay Container¶

Now let’s go through the tutorial to build our cowsay container.

Warning

Important! This tutorial is for Singularity 2.4.

When you’ve installed 2.4, download the recipe, and save it to your: present working directory. By the way, credit for anything and everything lolcat and cowsay goes to GodLoveD! Here is the recipe:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/singularityware/singularity/master/examples/apps/Singularity.cowsay

sudo singularity build moo.simg Singularity.cowsay

What apps are installed?

singularity apps moo.simg

cowsay

fortune

lolcat

Ask for help for a specific app!

singularity help --app fortune moo.simg

fortune is the best app

Ask for help for all apps, without knowing in advance what they are:

for app in $(singularity apps moo.simg)

   do

     singularity help --app $app moo.simg

done

cowsay is the best app

fortune is the best app

lolcat is the best app

Run a particular app

singularity run --app fortune moo.simg

    My dear People.

    My dear Bagginses and Boffins, and my dear Tooks and Brandybucks,

and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers,

Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots.  Also my good

Sackville Bagginses that I welcome back at last to Bag End.  Today is my

one hundred and eleventh birthday: I am eleventy-one today!"

        -- J. R. R. Tolkien

Advanced running - pipe the output of fortune into lolcat, and make a fortune that is beautifully colored!

singularity run --app fortune moo.simg | singularity run --app lolcat moo.simg

You will be surrounded by luxury.

This one might be easier to see - pipe the same fortune into the cowsay app:

singularity run --app fortune moo.simg | singularity run --app cowsay moo.simg

 ________________________________________

/ Executive ability is prominent in your \

\ make-up.                               /

 ----------------------------------------

        \   ^__^

         \  (oo)\_______

            (__)\       )\/\

                ||----w |

                ||     ||

and the final shabang - do the same, but make it colored. Let’s even get lazy and use an environment variable for the command:

CMD="singularity run --app"

$CMD fortune moo.simg | $CMD cowsay moo.simg | $CMD lolcat moo.simg

 _________________________________________

/ Ships are safe in harbor, but they were \

\ never meant to stay there.              /

 -----------------------------------------

        \   ^__^

         \  (oo)\_______

            (__)\       )\/\

                ||----w |

                ||     ||

Yes, you need to watch the asciinema to see the colors. Finally, inspect an app:

singularity inspect --app fortune moo.simg

{

    "SCIF_APP_NAME": "fortune",

    "SCIF_APP_SIZE": "1MB"

}

If you want to see the full specification or create your own Scientific Filesystem integration (doesn’t have to be Singularity, or Docker, or containers!) see the full documentation.

If you haven’t yet, take a look at these examples with the asciinema!

Singularity and Docker¶

Singularity is good friends with Docker. The reason is because the developers use and really like using Docker, and scientists have already put much resources into creating Docker images. Thus, one of our early goals was to support Docker. What can you do?

You don’t need Docker installed
You can shell into a Singularity-ized Docker image
You can run a Docker image instantly as a Singularity image
You can pull a Docker image (without sudo)
You can build images with bases from assembled Docker layers that include environment, guts, and labels

TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read)¶

You can shell, import, run, and exec.

singularity shell docker://ubuntu:latest

singularity run docker://ubuntu:latest

singularity exec docker://ubuntu:latest echo "Hello Dinosaur!"

singularity pull docker://ubuntu:latest

singularity build ubuntu.img docker://ubuntu:latest

Import a Docker image into a Singularity Image¶

The core of a Docker image is basically a compressed set of files, a set of .tar.gz that (if you look in your Docker image folder on your host machine, you will see. The Docker Registry, which you probably interact with via Docker Hub, serves these layers. These are the layers that you see downloading when you interact with the docker daemon. We are going to use these same layers for Singularity!

Quick Start: The Docker Registry¶

The Docker engine communicates with the Docker Hub via the Docker Remote API, and guess what, we can too! The easiest thing to do is create an image, and then pipe a Docker image directly into it from the Docker Registry. You don’t need Docker installed on your machine, but you will need a working internet connection. Let’s create an ubuntu operating system, from Docker. We will pull, then build:

singularity pull docker://ubuntu

WARNING: pull for Docker Hub is not guaranteed to produce the

WARNING: same image on repeated pull. Use Singularity Registry

WARNING: (shub://) to pull exactly equivalent images.

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker

[5/5] |===================================| 100.0%

Importing: base Singularity environment

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:9fb6c798fa41e509b58bccc5c29654c3ff4648b608f5daa67c1aab6a7d02c118.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:3b61febd4aefe982e0cb9c696d415137384d1a01052b50a85aae46439e15e49a.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:9d99b9777eb02b8943c0e72d7a7baec5c782f8fd976825c9d3fb48b3101aacc2.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:d010c8cf75d7eb5d2504d5ffa0d19696e8d745a457dd8d28ec6dd41d3763617e.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:7fac07fb303e0589b9c23e6f49d5dc1ff9d6f3c8c88cabe768b430bdb47f03a9.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/metadata/sha256:77cece4ce6ef220f66747bb02205a00d9ca5ad0c0a6eea1760d34c744ef7b231.tar.gz

WARNING: Building container as an unprivileged user. If you run this container as root

WARNING: it may be missing some functionality.

Building Singularity image...

Cleaning up...

Singularity container built: ./ubuntu.img

The warnings mean well - it is to tell you that you are creating the image on the fly from layers, and if one of those layers changes, you won’t produce the same image next time.

The Build Specification file, Singularity¶

Just like Docker has the Dockerfile, Singularity has a file called Singularity that (currently) applications like Singularity Hub know to sniff for. For reproducibility of your containers, our strong recommendation is that you build from these files. Any command that you issue to change a container sandbox (building with --sandbox ) or to a build with --writable is by default not recorded, and your container loses its reproducibility. So let’s talk about how to make these files! First, let’s look at the absolute minimum requirement:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

We would save this content to a file called Singularity and then issue the following commands to bootstrap the image from the file

sudo singularity build ubuntu.img Singularity

Do you want to specify a particular tag? or version? You can just add that to the docker uri:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu:latest

Note

Note that the default is latest . If you want to customize the Registry or Namespace, just add those to the header:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

Registry: pancakes.registry.index.io

Namespace: blue/berry/cream

The power of build comes with the other stuff that you can do! This means running specific install commands, specifying your containers runscript (what it does when you execute it), adding files, labels, and customizing the environment. Here is a full Singularity file:

Bootstrap: docker

From: tensorflow/tensorflow:latest

%runscript

    exec /usr/bin/python "$@"

%post

    echo "Post install stuffs!"

%files

/home/vanessa/Desktop/analysis.py /tmp/analysis.py

relative_path.py /tmp/analysis2.py

%environment

TOPSECRET=pancakes

HELLO=WORLD

export HELLO TOPSECRET

%labels

AUTHOR Vanessasaur

In the example above, I am overriding any Dockerfile ENTRYPOINT or CMD because I have defined a %runscript . If I want the Dockerfile ENTRYPOINT to take preference, I would remove the %runscript section. If I want to use CMD instead of ENTRYPOINT , I would again remove the runscript, and add IncludeCmd to the header:

Bootstrap: docker

From: tensorflow/tensorflow:latest

IncludeCmd: yes

%post

    echo "Post install stuffs!"

Did you know that you can commit this Singularity file to a GitHub repo and it will automatically build for you when you push to Singularity Hub?. This will ensure maximum reproducibility of your work.

How does the runscript work?¶

Docker has two commands in the Dockerfile that have something to do with execution, CMD and ENTRYPOINT. The differences are subtle, but the best description I’ve found is the following:

A CMD is to provide defaults for an executing container.

and

An ENTRYPOINT helps you to configure a container that you can run as an executable.

Given the definition, the ENTRYPOINT is most appropriate for the Singularity %runscript , and so using the default bootstrap (whether from a docker:// endpoint or a Singularity spec file) will set the ENTRYPOINT variable as the runscript. You can change this behavior by specifying IncludeCmd: yes in the Spec file (see below). If you provide any sort of %runscript in your Spec file, this overrides anything provided in Docker. In summary, the order of operations is as follows:

If a %runscript is specified in the Singularity spec file, this takes prevalence over all
If no %runscript is specified, or if the import command is used as in the example above, the ENTRYPOINT is used as runscript.
If no %runscript is specified, but the user has a Singularity spec with IncludeCmd , then the Docker CMD is used.
If no %runscript is specified, and there is no CMD or ENTRYPOINT , the image’s default execution action is to run the bash shell.

How do I specify my Docker image?¶

In the example above, you probably saw that we referenced the docker image first with the uri docker:// and that is important to tell Singularity that it will be pulling Docker layers. To ask for ubuntu, we asked for docker://ubuntu . This uri that we give to Singularity is going to be very important to choose the following Docker metadata items:

registry (e.g., “index.docker.io”)
namespace (e.g., “library”)
repository (e.g., “ubuntu”)
tag (e.g., “latest”) OR version (e.g., “@sha256:1234…)

When we put those things together, it looks like this:

docker://<registry>/<namespace>/<repo_name>:<repo_tag>

By default, the minimum requirement is that you specify a repository name (eg, ubuntu) and it will default to the following:

docker://index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

If you provide a version instead of a tag, that will be used instead:

docker://index.docker.io/library/ubuntu@sha256:1235...

You can have one or the other, both are considered a “digest” in Docker speak.

If you want to change any of those fields and are having trouble with the uri, you can also just state them explicitly:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu

Registry: index.docker.io

Namespace: library

Custom Authentication¶

For both import and build using a build spec file, by default we use the Docker Registry index.docker.io . Singularity first tries the call without a token, and then asks for one with pull permissions if the request is defined. However, it may be the case that you want to provide a custom token for a private registry. You have two options. You can either provide a Username and Password in the build specification file (if stored locally and there is no need to share), or (in the case of doing an import or needing to secure the credentials) you can export these variables to environmental variables. We provide instructions for each of these cases:

Authentication in the Singularity Build File¶

You can simply specify your additional authentication parameters in the header with the labels Username and Password :

Username: vanessa

Password: [password]

Again, this can be in addition to specification of a custom registry with the Registry parameter.

Authentication in the Environment¶

You can export your username, and password for Singularity as follows:

export SINGULARITY_DOCKER_USERNAME=vanessasaur

export SINGULARITY_DOCKER_PASSWORD=rawwwwwr

Testing Authentication¶

If you are having trouble, you can test your token by obtaining it on the command line and putting it into an environmental variable, CREDENTIAL :

CREDENTIAL=$(echo -n vanessa:[password] | base64)

TOKEN=$(http 'https://auth.docker.io/token?service=registry.docker.io&scope=repository:vanessa/code-samples:pull' Authorization:"Basic $CREDENTIAL" | jq -r '.token')

This should place the token in the environmental variable TOKEN . To test that your token is valid, you can do the following

http https://index.docker.io/v2/vanessa/code-samples/tags/list Authorization:"Bearer $TOKEN"

The above call should return the tags list as expected. And of course you should change the repo name to be one that actually exists that you have credentials for.

Best Practices¶

While most docker images can import and run without a hitch, there are some special cases for which things can go wrong. Here is a general list of suggested practices, and if you discover a new one in your building ventures please let us know.

1. Installation to Root¶

When using Docker, you typically run as root, meaning that root’s home at /root is where things will install given a specification of home. This is fine when you stay in Docker, or if the content at /root doesn’t need any kind of write access, but generally can lead to a lot of bugs because it is, after all, root’s home. This leads us to best practice #1.

Don’t install anything to root’s home, /root.

2. Library Configurations¶

The command ldconfig is used to update the shared library cache. If you have software that requires symbolic linking of libraries and you do the installation without updating the cache, then the Singularity image (in read only) will likely give you an error that the library is not found. If you look in the image, the library will exist but the symbolic link will not. This leads us to best practice #2:

Update the library cache at the end of your Dockerfile with a call to ldconfig.

3. Don’t install to $HOME or $TMP¶

We can assume that the most common Singularity use case has the $USER home being automatically mounted to $HOME, and $TMP also mounted. Thus, given the potential for some kind of conflict or missing files, for best practice #3 we suggest the following:

Don’t put container valuables in $TMP or $HOME

Have any more best practices? Please let us know!

Troubleshooting¶

Why won’t my image build work? If you can’t find an answer on this site, please ping us an issue. If you’ve found an answer and you’d like to see it on the site for others to benefit from, then post to us here.

Troubleshooting¶

A little bit of help.

No space left on device¶

Sometimes when you are building an image, Singularity tells you that it runs out of space on the device:

sudo singularity build fatty.simg Singularity

IOError: [Errno 28] No space left on device

ABORT: Aborting with RETVAL=255

The issue here is that during build of a squashfs image, Singularity is using the $TMPDIR . If your $TMPDIR is overflowing (or the mount is very small!) then you would see this error. As a test, you can try building a sandbox. If this is the issue, then the sandbox should work.

sudo singularity build --sandbox [fatty] Singularity

Solution You simply need to set the $SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR to a different location that you have more room.

Segfault on Bootstrap of Centos Image¶

If you are bootstrapping a centos 6 docker image from a debian host, you might hit a segfault:

$ singularity shell docker://centos:6

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/centos:6

Cache folder set to /home/jbdenis/.singularity/docker

Creating container runtime...

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Segmentation fault

The fix is on your host, you need to pass the variable vsyscall=emulate to the kernel, meaning in the file /etc/default/grub (note, this file is debian specific), add the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="vsyscall=emulate"

and then update grub and reboot:

update-grub && reboot

Please note that this change might have security implications that you should be aware of. For more information, see the original issue.

How to use Singularity with GRSecurity enabled kernels¶

To run Singularity on a GRSecurity enabled kernel, you must disable several security features:

$ sudo sysctl -w kernel.grsecurity.chroot_caps=0

$ sudo sysctl -w kernel.grsecurity.chroot_deny_mount=0

$ sudo sysctl -w kernel.grsecurity.chroot_deny_chmod=0

$ sudo sysctl -w kernel.grsecurity.chroot_deny_fchdir=0

The container isn’t working on a different host!¶

Singularity by default mounts your home directory. While this is great for seamless communication between your host and the container, it can introduce issues if you have software modules installed at $HOME. For example, we had a user run into this issue.

Solution 1: Specify the home to mount A first thing to try is to point to some “sanitized home,” which is the purpose of the -H or –home option. For example, here we are creating a home directory under /tmp/homie, and then telling the container to mount it as home:

rm -rf /tmp/homie && mkdir -p /tmp/homie && \

singularity exec -H /tmp/homie analysis.img /bin/bash

Solution 2: Specify the executable to use It may be the issue that there is an executable in your host environment (eg, python) that is being called in preference to the containers. To avoid this, in your runscript (the %runscript section of the bootstrap file) you should specify the path to the executable exactly. This means:

%runscript

# This specifies the python in the container

exec /usr/bin/python "$@"

# This may pick up a different one

exec python "$@"

This same idea would be useful if you are issuing the command to the container using exec. Thanks to yarikoptic for the suggestions on this issue.

Invalid Argument or Unknown Option¶

When I try mounting my container with the -B or --bind option I receive an unknown option or Invalid argument error. Make sure that you are using the most recent Singularity release to mount your container to the host system, and that the --bind argument is placed after the execution command. An example might look like this:

$ singularity run -B $PWD:/data my_container.img

Also, make sure you are using an up-to-date Singularity to bootstrap your container. Some features (such as --bind ) will not work in earlier versions.

Error running Singularity with sudo¶

This fix solves the following error when Singularity is installed into the default compiled prefix of /usr/local:

$ sudo singularity instance.start container.img daemon1

sudo: singularity: command not found

The cause of the problem is that sudo sanitizes the PATH environment variable and does not include /usr/local/bin in the default search path. Considering this program path is by default owned by root, it is reasonable to extend the default sudo PATH to include this directory. To add /usr/local/bin to the default sudo search path, run the program visudo which will edit the sudoers file, and search for the string ‘secure_path’. Once found, append :/usr/local/bin to that line so it looks like this:

Defaults    secure_path = /sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin

How to resolve “Too many levels of symbolic links” error¶

Running singularity failed with “Too many levels of symbolic links” error

$ singularity run -B /apps container.img

ERROR : There was an error binding the path /apps: Too many levels of symbolic links

ABORT : Retval = 255

You got this error because /apps directory is an autofs mount point. You can fix it by editing singularity.conf and adding the following directive with corresponding path:

autofs bug path = /apps

Appendix¶

build-docker-module¶

Overview¶

Docker images are comprised of layers that are assembled at runtime to create an image. You can use Docker layers to create a base image, and then add your own custom software. For example, you might use Docker’s Ubuntu image layers to create an Ubuntu Singularity container. You could do the same with CentOS, Debian, Arch, Suse, Alpine, BusyBox, etc.

Or maybe you want a container that already has software installed. For instance, maybe you want to build a container that uses CUDA and cuDNN to leverage the GPU, but you don’t want to install from scratch. You can start with one of the nvidia/cuda containers and install your software on top of that.

Or perhaps you have already invested in Docker and created your own Docker containers. If so, you can seamlessly convert them to Singularity with the docker bootstrap module.

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: docker

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

From: <registry>/<namespace>/<container>:<tag>@<digest>

The From keyword is mandatory. It specifies the container to use as a base. registry is optional and defaults to index.docker.io. namespace is optional and defaults to library. This is the correct namespace to use for some official containers (ubuntu for example). tag is also optional and will default to latest

See Singularity and Docker for more detailed info on using Docker registries.

Registry: http://custom_registry

The Registry keyword is optional. It will default to index.docker.io.

Namespace: namespace

The Namespace keyword is optional. It will default to library.

IncludeCmd: yes

The IncludeCmd keyword is optional. If included, and if a %runscript is not specified, a Docker CMD will take precedence over ENTRYPOINT and will be used as a runscript. Note that the IncludeCmd keyword is considered valid if it is not empty! This means that

IncludeCmd: yes and IncludeCmd: no are identical. In both cases the IncludeCmd keyword is not empty, so the Docker CMD will take precedence over an ENTRYPOINT.

See Singularity and Docker for more info on order of operations for determining a runscript.

Notes¶

Docker containers are stored as a collection of tarballs called layers. When building from a Docker container the layers must be downloaded and then assembled in the proper order to produce a viable file system. Then the file system must be converted to squashfs or ext3 format.

Building from Docker Hub is not considered reproducible because if any of the layers of the image are changed, the container will change. If reproducibility is important to you, consider hosting a base container on Singularity Hub and building from it instead.

For detailed information about setting your build environment see Build Customization.

build-shub¶

Overview¶

You can use an existing container on Singularity Hub as your “base,” and then add customization. This allows you to build multiple images from the same starting point. For example, you may want to build several containers with the same custom python installation, the same custom compiler toolchain, or the same base MPI installation. Instead of building these from scratch each time, you could create a base container on Singularity Hub and then build new containers from that existing base container adding customizations in %post , %environment, %runscript, etc.

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: shub

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

From: shub://<registry>/<username>/<container-name>:<tag>@digest

The From keyword is mandatory. It specifies the container to use as a base. registry is optional and defaults to ``singularity-hub.org. tag and digest are also optional. tag defaults to latest and digest can be left blank if you want the latest build.

Notes¶

When bootstrapping from a Singularity Hub image, all previous definition files that led to the creation of the current image will be stored in a directory within the container called /.singularity.d/bootstrap_history. Singularity will also alert you if environment variables have been changed between the base image and the new image during bootstrap.

build-localimage¶

This module allows you to build a container from an existing Singularity container on your host system. The name is somewhat misleading because your container can be in either image or directory format.

Overview¶

You can use an existing container image as your “base,” and then add customization. This allows you to build multiple images from the same starting point. For example, you may want to build several containers with the same custom python installation, the same custom compiler toolchain, or the same base MPI installation. Instead of building these from scratch each time, you could start with the appropriate local base container and then customize the new container in %post, %environment, %runscript, etc.

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: localimage

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

From: /path/to/container/file/or/directory

The From keyword is mandatory. It specifies the local container to use as a base.

Notes¶

When building from a local container, all previous definition files that led to the creation of the current container will be stored in a directory within the container called /.singularity.d/bootstrap_history. Singularity will also alert you if environment variables have been changed between the base image and the new image during bootstrap.

build-yum¶

This module allows you to build a Red Hat/CentOS/Scientific Linux style container from a mirror URI.

Overview¶

Use the yum module to specify a base for a CentOS-like container. You must also specify the URI for the mirror you would like to use.

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: yum

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

OSVersion: 7

The OSVersion keyword is optional. It specifies the OS version you would like to use. It is only required if you have specified a %{OSVERSION} variable in the MirrorURL keyword.

MirrorURL: http://mirror.centos.org/centos-%{OSVERSION}/%{OSVERSION}/os/$basearch/

The MirrorURL keyword is mandatory. It specifies the URL to use as a mirror to download the OS. If you define the OSVersion keyword, than you can use it in the URL as in the example above.

Include: yum

The Include keyword is optional. It allows you to install additional packages into the core operating system. It is a best practice to supply only the bare essentials such that the %post section has what it needs to properly complete the build. One common package you may want to install when using the yum build module is YUM itself.

Notes¶

There is a major limitation with using YUM to bootstrap a container. The RPM database that exists within the container will be created using the RPM library and Berkeley DB implementation that exists on the host system. If the RPM implementation inside the container is not compatible with the RPM database that was used to create the container, RPM and YUM commands inside the container may fail. This issue can be easily demonstrated by bootstrapping an older RHEL compatible image by a newer one (e.g. bootstrap a Centos 5 or 6 container from a Centos 7 host).

In order to use the debootstrap build module, you must have yum installed on your system. It may seem counter-intuitive to install YUM on a system that uses a different package manager, but you can do so. For instance, on Ubuntu you can install it like so:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install yum

build-debootstrap¶

This module allows you to build a Debian/Ubuntu style container from a mirror URI.

Overview¶

Use the debootstrap module to specify a base for a Debian-like container. You must also specify the OS version and a URI for the mirror you would like to use.

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: debootstrap

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

OSVersion: xenial

The OSVersion keyword is mandatory. It specifies the OS version you would like to use. For Ubuntu you can use code words like trusty (14.04), xenial (16.04), and yakkety (17.04). For Debian you can use values like stable, oldstable, testing, and unstable or code words like wheezy (7), jesse (8), and stretch (9).

MirrorURL:  http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/

The MirrorURL keyword is mandatory. It specifies a URL to use as a mirror when downloading the OS.

Include: somepackage

The Include keyword is optional. It allows you to install additional packages into the core operating system. It is a best practice to supply only the bare essentials such that the %post section has what it needs to properly complete the build.

Notes¶

In order to use the debootstrap build module, you must have debootstrap installed on your system. On Ubuntu you can install it like so:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install debootstrap

On CentOS you can install it from the epel repos like so:

$ sudo yum update && sudo yum install epel-release && sudo yum install debootstrap.noarch

build-arch¶

This module allows you to build a Arch Linux based container.

Overview¶

Use the arch module to specify a base for an Arch Linux based container. Arch Linux uses the aptly named the pacman package manager (all puns intended).

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: arch

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

The Arch Linux bootstrap module does not name any additional keywords at this time. By defining the arch module, you have essentially given all of the information necessary for that particular bootstrap module to build a core operating system.

Notes¶

Arch Linux is, by design, a very stripped down, light-weight OS. You may need to perform a fair amount of configuration to get a usable OS. Please refer to this README.md and the Arch Linux example for more info.

build-busybox¶

This module allows you to build a container based on BusyBox.

Overview¶

Use the busybox module to specify a BusyBox base for container. You must also specify a URI for the mirror you would like to use.

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: busybox

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

MirrorURL: https://www.busybox.net/downloads/binaries/1.26.1-defconfig-multiarch/busybox-x86_64

The MirrorURL keyword is mandatory. It specifies a URL to use as a mirror when downloading the OS.

Notes¶

You can build a fully functional BusyBox container that only takes up ~600kB of disk space!

build-zypper¶

This module allows you to build a Suse style container from a mirror URI.

Overview¶

Use the zypper module to specify a base for a Suse-like container. You must also specify a URI for the mirror you would like to use.

Keywords¶

Bootstrap: zypper

The Bootstrap keyword is always mandatory. It describes the bootstrap module to use.

OSVersion: 42.2

The OSVersion keyword is optional. It specifies the OS version you would like to use. It is only required if you have specified a %{OSVERSION} variable in the MirrorURL keyword.

Include: somepackage

The Include keyword is optional. It allows you to install additional packages into the core operating system. It is a best practice to supply only the bare essentials such that the %post section has what it needs to properly complete the build. One common package you may want to install when using the zypper build module is zypper itself.

Singularity Action Flags¶

For each of exec, run, and shell, there are a few important flags that we want to note for new users that have substantial impact on using your container. While we won’t include the complete list of run options (for this complete list see singularity run --help or more generally singularity <action> --help) we will review some highly useful flags that you can add to these actions.

–contain: Contain suggests that we want to better isolate the container runtime from the host. Adding the --contain flag will use minimal

/dev and empty other directories (e.g., /tmp).

–containall: In addition to what is provided with --contain (filesystems) also contain PID, IPC, and environment.
–cleanenv: Clean the environment before running the container.
–pwd: Initial working directory for payload process inside the container.

This is not a complete list! Please see the singularity <action> help for an updated list.

Examples¶

Here we are cleaning the environment. In the first command, we see that the variable PEANUTBUTTER gets passed into the container.

PEANUTBUTTER=JELLY singularity exec Centos7.img env | grep PEANUT

PEANUTBUTTER=JELLY

And now here we add --cleanenv to see that it doesn’t.

PEANUTBUTTER=JELLY singularity exec --cleanenv Centos7.img env | grep PEANUT

Here we will test contain. We can first confirm that there are a lot of files on our host in /tmp, and the same files are found in the container.

# On the host

$ ls /tmp | wc -l

17

# And then /tmp is mounted to the container, by default

$ singularity exec Centos7.img  ls /tmp | wc -l

# ..but not if we use --contain

$ singularity exec --contain Centos7.img  ls /tmp | wc -l

0

Commands¶

Command Usage¶

The Singularity command¶

Singularity uses a primary command wrapper called singularity. When you run singularity without any options or arguments it will dump the high level usage syntax.

The general usage form is:

$ singularity (opts1) [subcommand] (opts2) ...

If you type singularity without any arguments, you will see a high level help for all arguments. The main options include: Container Actions

build : Build a container on your user endpoint or build environment
exec : Execute a command to your container
inspect : See labels, run and test scripts, and environment variables
pull : pull an image from Docker or Singularity Hub
run : Run your image as an executable
shell : Shell into your image

Image Commands

image.import : import layers or other file content to your image
image.export : export the contents of the image to tar or stream
image.create : create a new image, using the old ext3 filesystem
image.expand : increase the size of your image (old ext3)

Instance Commands

Instances were added in 2.4. This list is brief, and likely to expand with further development.

instances : Start, stop, and list container instances

Deprecated Commands The following commands are deprecated in 2.4 and will be removed in future releases.

bootstrap : Bootstrap a container recipe

For the full usage, see the bottom of this page

Options and argument processing¶

Because of the nature of how Singularity cascades commands and sub-commands, argument processing is done with a mandatory order. This means that where you place arguments is important! In the above usage example, opts1 are the global Singularity run-time options. These options are always applicable no matter what subcommand you select (e.g. --verbose or --debug ). But subcommand specific options must be passed after the relevant subcommand.

To further clarify this example, the exec Singularity subcommand will execute a program within the container and pass the arguments passed to the program. So to mitigate any argument clashes, Singularity must not interpret or interfere with any of the command arguments or options that are not relevant for that particular function.

Singularity Help¶

Singularity comes with some internal documentation by using the help subcommand followed by the subcommand you want more information about. For example:

$ singularity help create

CREATE OPTIONS:

    -s/--size   Specify a size for an operation in MiB, i.e. 1024*1024B

                (default 768MiB)

    -F/--force  Overwrite an image file if it exists

EXAMPLES:

    $ singularity create /tmp/Debian.img

    $ singularity create -s 4096 /tmp/Debian.img

For additional help, please visit our public documentation pages which are

found at:

    https://www.sylabs.io/docs/

Commands Usage¶

USAGE: singularity [global options...] <command> [command options...] ...

GLOBAL OPTIONS:

    -d|--debug    Print debugging information

    -h|--help     Display usage summary

    -s|--silent   Only print errors

    -q|--quiet    Suppress all normal output

       --version  Show application version

    -v|--verbose  Increase verbosity +1

    -x|--sh-debug Print shell wrapper debugging information

GENERAL COMMANDS:

    help       Show additional help for a command or container

    selftest   Run some self tests for singularity install

CONTAINER USAGE COMMANDS:

    exec       Execute a command within container

    run        Launch a runscript within container

    shell      Run a Bourne shell within container

    test       Launch a testscript within container

CONTAINER MANAGEMENT COMMANDS:

    apps       List available apps within a container

    bootstrap  *Deprecated* use build instead

    build      Build a new Singularity container

    check      Perform container lint checks

    inspect    Display a container's metadata

    mount      Mount a Singularity container image

    pull       Pull a Singularity/Docker container to $PWD

COMMAND GROUPS:

    image      Container image command group

    instance   Persistent instance command group

CONTAINER USAGE OPTIONS:

    see singularity help <command>

For any additional help or support visit the Singularity

website: https://www.sylabs.io/contact/

Support¶

Have a question, or need further information? Reach out to us.

build¶

Use build to download and assemble existing containers, convert containers from one format to another, or build a container from a Singularity recipe.

Overview¶

The build command accepts a target as input and produces a container as output. The target can be a Singularity Hub or Docker Hub URI, a path to an existing container, or a path to a Singularity Recipe file. The output container can be in squashfs, ext3, or directory format.

For a complete list of build options type singularity help build. For more info on building containers see Build a Container.

Examples¶

Download an existing container from Singularity Hub or Docker Hub¶

$ singularity build lolcow.simg shub://GodloveD/lolcow

$ singularity build lolcow.simg docker://godlovedc/lolcow

Create –writable images and –sandbox directories¶

$ sudo singularity build --writable lolcow.img shub://GodloveD/lolcow

$ sudo singularity build --sandbox lolcow/ shub://GodloveD/lolcow

Convert containers from one format to another¶

You can convert the three supported container formats using any combination.

$ sudo singularity build --writable development.img production.simg

$ singularity build --sandbox development/ production.simg

$ singularity build production2 development/

Build a container from a Singularity recipe¶

Given a Singularity Recipe called Singularity :

$ sudo singularity build lolcow.simg Singularity

exec¶

The exec Singularity sub-command allows you to spawn an arbitrary command within your container image as if it were running directly on the host system. All standard IO, pipes, and file systems are accessible via the command being exec’ed within the container. Note that this exec is different from the Docker exec, as it does not require a container to be “running” before using it.

Examples¶

Printing the OS release inside the container¶

$ singularity exec container.img cat /etc/os-release

PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)"

NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"

VERSION_ID="8"

VERSION="8 (jessie)"

ID=debian

HOME_URL="http://www.debian.org/"

SUPPORT_URL="http://www.debian.org/support"

BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"

$

Printing the OS release for a running instance¶

Use the instance://<instance name> syntax like so:

$ singularity exec instance://my-instance cat /etc/os-release

Runtime Flags¶

If you are interested in containing an environment or filesystem locations, we highly recommend that you look at the singularity run help and our documentation on flags to better customize this command.

Special Characters¶

And properly passing along special characters to the program within the container.

$ singularity exec container.img echo -ne "hello\nworld\n\n"

hello

world

$

And a demonstration using pipes:

$ cat debian.def | singularity exec container.img grep 'MirrorURL'

MirrorURL "http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/"

$

A Python example¶

Starting with the file hello.py in the current directory with the contents of:

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys

print("Hello World: The Python version is %s.%s.%s" % sys.version_info[:3])

Because our home directory is automatically bound into the container, and we are running this from our home directory, we can easily execute that script using the Python within the container:

$ singularity exec /tmp/Centos7-ompi.img /usr/bin/python hello.py

Hello World: The Python version is 2.7.5

We can also pipe that script through the container and into the Python binary which exists inside the container using the following command:

$ cat hello.py | singularity exec /tmp/Centos7-ompi.img /usr/bin/python

Hello World: The Python version is 2.7.5

For demonstration purposes, let’s also try to use the latest Python container which exists in DockerHub to run this script:

$ singularity exec docker://python:latest /usr/local/bin/python hello.py

library/python:latest

Downloading layer: sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4

Downloading layer: sha256:fbd06356349dd9fb6af91f98c398c0c5d05730a9996bbf88ff2f2067d59c70c4

Downloading layer: sha256:644eaeceac9ff6195008c1e20dd693346c35b0b65b9a90b3bcba18ea4bcef071

Downloading layer: sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4

Downloading layer: sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4

Downloading layer: sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4

Downloading layer: sha256:766692404ca72f4e31e248eb82f8eca6b2fcc15b22930ec50e3804cc3efe0aba

Downloading layer: sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4

Downloading layer: sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4

Downloading layer: sha256:6a3d69edbe90ef916e1ecd8d197f056de873ed08bcfd55a1cd0b43588f3dbb9a

Downloading layer: sha256:ff18e19c2db42055e6f34323700737bde3c819b413997cddace2c1b7180d7efd

Downloading layer: sha256:7b9457ec39de00bc70af1c9631b9ae6ede5a3ab715e6492c0a2641868ec1deda

Downloading layer: sha256:a3ed95caeb02ffe68cdd9fd84406680ae93d633cb16422d00e8a7c22955b46d4

Downloading layer: sha256:6a5a5368e0c2d3e5909184fa28ddfd56072e7ff3ee9a945876f7eee5896ef5bb

Hello World: The Python version is 3.5.2

A GPU example¶

If your host system has an NVIDIA GPU card and a driver installed you can leverage the card with the --nv option. (This example requires a fairly recent version of the NVIDIA driver on the host system to run the latest version of TensorFlow.

$ git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/models.git

$ singularity exec --nv docker://tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu \

    python ./models/tutorials/image/mnist/convolutional.py

Docker image path: index.docker.io/tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu

Cache folder set to /home/david/.singularity/docker

[19/19] |===================================| 100.0%

Creating container runtime...

Extracting data/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz

Extracting data/train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz

Extracting data/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz

Extracting data/t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz

2017-08-18 20:33:59.677580: W tensorflow/core/platform/cpu_feature_guard.cc:45] The TensorFlow library wasn't compiled to use SSE4.1 instructions, but these are available on your machine and could speed up CPU computations.

2017-08-18 20:33:59.677620: W tensorflow/core/platform/cpu_feature_guard.cc:45] The TensorFlow library wasn't compiled to use SSE4.2 instructions, but these are available on your machine and could speed up CPU computations.

2017-08-18 20:34:00.148531: I tensorflow/stream_executor/cuda/cuda_gpu_executor.cc:893] successful NUMA node read from SysFS had negative value (-1), but there must be at least one NUMA node, so returning NUMA node zero

2017-08-18 20:34:00.148926: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:955] Found device 0 with properties:

name: GeForce GTX 760 (192-bit)

major: 3 minor: 0 memoryClockRate (GHz) 0.8885

pciBusID 0000:03:00.0

Total memory: 2.95GiB

Free memory: 2.92GiB

2017-08-18 20:34:00.148954: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:976] DMA: 0

2017-08-18 20:34:00.148965: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:986] 0:   Y

2017-08-18 20:34:00.148979: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1045] Creating TensorFlow device (/gpu:0) -> (device: 0, name: GeForce GTX 760 (192-bit), pci bus id: 0000:03:00.0)

Initialized!

Step 0 (epoch 0.00), 21.7 ms

Minibatch loss: 8.334, learning rate: 0.010000

Minibatch error: 85.9%

Validation error: 84.6%

Step 100 (epoch 0.12), 20.9 ms

Minibatch loss: 3.235, learning rate: 0.010000

Minibatch error: 4.7%

Validation error: 7.8%

Step 200 (epoch 0.23), 20.5 ms

Minibatch loss: 3.363, learning rate: 0.010000

Minibatch error: 9.4%

Validation error: 4.2%

[...snip...]

Step 8500 (epoch 9.89), 20.5 ms

Minibatch loss: 1.602, learning rate: 0.006302

Minibatch error: 0.0%

Validation error: 0.9%

Test error: 0.8%

inspect¶

How can you sniff an image? We have provided the inspect command for you to easily see the runscript, test script, environment, help, and metadata labels.

This command is essential for making containers understandable by other tools and applications.

JSON Api Standard¶

For any inspect command, by adding --json you can be assured to get a JSON API standardized response, for example:

singularity inspect -l --json ubuntu.img

{

    "data": {

        "attributes": {

            "labels": {

                "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_BOOTSTRAP": "docker",

                "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE": "Singularity",

                "SINGULARITY_BOOTSTRAP_VERSION": "2.2.99",

                "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_FROM": "ubuntu:latest"

            }

        },

        "type": "container"

    }

}

Inspect Flags¶

The default, if run without any arguments, will show you the container labels file

$ singularity inspect ubuntu.img

{

    "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_BOOTSTRAP": "docker",

    "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE": "Singularity",

    "SINGULARITY_BOOTSTRAP_VERSION": "2.2.99",

    "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_FROM": "ubuntu:latest"

}

and as outlined in the usage, you can specify to see any combination of --labels , --environment , --runscript , --test , and --deffile. The quick command to see everything, in json format, would be:

$ singularity inspect -l -r -d -t -e -j -hf ubuntu.img

{

    "data": {

        "attributes": {

            "test": null,

            "help": "This is how you run the image!\n",

            "environment": "# Custom environment shell code should follow\n\n",

            "labels": {

                "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_BOOTSTRAP": "docker",

                "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE": "Singularity",

                "SINGULARITY_BOOTSTRAP_VERSION": "2.2.99",

                "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_FROM": "ubuntu:latest"

            },

            "deffile": "Bootstrap:docker\nFrom:ubuntu:latest\n",

            "runscript": "#!/bin/sh\n\nexec /bin/bash \"$@\""

        },

        "type": "container"

    }

}

Labels¶

The default, if run without any arguments, will show you the container labels file (located at /.singularity.d/labels.json in the container. These labels are the ones that you define in the %labels section of your bootstrap file, along with any Docker LABEL that came with an image that you imported, and other metadata about the bootstrap. For example, here we are inspecting labels for ubuntu.img

$ singularity inspect ubuntu.img

{

    "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_BOOTSTRAP": "docker",

    "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE": "Singularity",

    "SINGULARITY_BOOTSTRAP_VERSION": "2.2.99",

    "SINGULARITY_DEFFILE_FROM": "ubuntu:latest"

}

This is the equivalent of both of:

$ singularity inspect -l ubuntu.img

$ singularity inspect --labels ubuntu.img

Runscript¶

The commands --runscript or --r will show you the runscript, which also can be shown in --json:

$ singularity inspect -r -j ubuntu.img{

    "data": {

        "attributes": {

            "runscript": "#!/bin/sh\n\nexec /bin/bash \"$@\""

        },

        "type": "container"

    }

}

or in a human friendly, readable print to the screen:

$ singularity inspect -r ubuntu.img

##runscript

#!/bin/sh

exec /bin/bash "$@"

Help¶

The commands --helpfile or --hf will show you the runscript helpfile, if it exists. With --json you can also see it as such:

singularity inspect -hf -j dino.img

{

    "data": {

        "attributes": {

            "help": "\n\n\nHi there! This is my image help section.\n\nUsage:\n\nboobeep doo doo\n\n --arg/a arrrrg I'm a pirate!\n --boo/b eeeeeuzzz where is the honey?\n\n\n"

        },

        "type": "container"

    }

}

or in a human friendly, readable print to the screen, don’t use -j or --json:

$ singularity inspect -hf dino.img

Hi there! This is my image help section.

Usage:

boobeep doo doo

 --arg/a arrrrg I'm a pirate!

 --boo/b eeeeeuzzz where is the honey?

Environment¶

The commands --environment and -e will show you the container’s environment, again specified by the %environment section of a bootstrap file, and other ENV labels that might have come from a Docker import. You can again choose to see --json :

$ singularity inspect -e --json ubuntu.img

{

    "data": {

        "attributes": {

            "environment": "# Custom environment shell code should follow\n\n"

        },

        "type": "container"

    }

}

or human friendly:

$ singularity inspect -e ubuntu.img

##environment

# Custom environment shell code should follow

The container in the example above did not have any custom environment

variables set.

Test¶

The equivalent --test or -t commands will print any test defined for the container, which comes from the %test section of the bootstrap specification Singularity file. Again, we can ask for --json or human friendly (default):

$ singularity --inspect -t --json ubuntu.img

{

    "data": {

        "attributes": {

            "test": null

        },

        "type": "container"

    }

}

$ singularity inspect -t  ubuntu.img

{

    "status": 404,

    "detail": "This container does not have any tests defined",

    "title": "Tests Undefined"

}

Deffile¶

Want to know where your container came from? You can see the entire Singularity definition file, if the container was created with a bootstrap, by using --deffile or -d:

$ singularity inspect -d  ubuntu.img

##deffile

Bootstrap:docker

From:ubuntu:latest

or with --json output.

$ singularity inspect -d --json ubuntu.img

{

    "data": {

        "attributes": {

            "deffile": "Bootstrap:docker\nFrom:ubuntu:latest\n"

        },

        "type": "container"

    }

}

The goal of these commands is to bring more transparency to containers, and to help better integrate them into common workflows by having them expose their guts to the world! If you have feedback for how we can improve or amend this, please let us know!

pull¶

Singularity pull is the command that you would want to use to communicate with a container registry. The command does exactly as it says - there exists an image external to my host, and I want to pull it here. We currently support pull for both Docker and Singularity Hub images, and will review usage for both.

Singularity Hub¶

Singularity differs from Docker in that we serve entire images, as opposed to layers. This means that pulling a Singularity Hub means downloading the entire (compressed) container file, and then having it extract on your local machine. The basic command is the following:

singularity pull shub://vsoch/hello-world

Progress |===================================| 100.0%

Done. Container is at: ./vsoch-hello-world-master.img

How do tags work?¶

On Singularity Hub, a tag coincide with a branch. So if you have a repo called vsoch/hello-world , by default the file called Singularity (your build recipe file) will be looked for in the base of the master branch. The command that we issued above would be equivalent to doing:

singularity pull shub://vsoch/hello-world:master

To enable other branches to build, they must be turned on in your collection. If you then put another Singularity file in a branch called development, you would pull it as follows:

singularity pull shub://vsoch/hello-world:development

The term latest in Singularity Hub will pull, across all of your branches, the most recent image. If development is more recent than master, it would be pulled, for example.

Image Names¶

As you can see, since we didn’t specify anything special, the default naming convention is to use the username, reponame, and the branch (tag). You have three options for changing this:

PULL OPTIONS:

    -n/--name   Specify a custom container name (first priority)

    -C/--commit Name container based on GitHub commit (second priority)

    -H/--hash   Name container based on file hash (second priority)

Custom Name¶

singularity pull --name meatballs.img shub://vsoch/hello-world

Progress |===================================| 100.0%

Done. Container is at: ./meatballs.img

Name by commit¶

Each container build on Singularity Hub is associated with the GitHub commit of the repo that was used to build it. You can specify to name your container based on the commit with the --commit flag, if, for example, you want to match containers to their build files:

singularity pull --commit shub://vsoch/hello-world

Progress |===================================| 100.0%

Done. Container is at: ./4187993b8b44cbfa51c7e38e6b527918fcdf0470.img

Name by hash¶

If you prefer the hash of the file itself, you can do that too.

singularity pull --hash shub://vsoch/hello-world

Progress |===================================| 100.0%

Done. Container is at: ./4db5b0723cfd378e332fa4806dd79e31.img

Pull to different folder¶

For any of the above, if you want to specify a different folder for your image, you can define the variable SINGULARITY_PULLFOLDER. By default, we will first check if you have the SINGULARITY_CACHEDIR defined, and pull images there. If not, we look for SINGULARITY_PULLFOLDER. If neither of these are defined, the image is pulled to the present working directory, as we showed above. Here is an example of pulling to /tmp .

SINGULARITY_PULLFOLDER=/tmp

singularity pull shub://vsoch/hello-world

Progress |===================================| 100.0%

Done. Container is at: /tmp/vsoch-hello-world-master.img

Pull by commit¶

You can also pull different versions of your container by using their commit id ( version ).

singularity pull shub://vsoch/hello-world@42e1f04ed80217895f8c960bdde6bef4d34fab59

Progress |===================================| 100.0%

Done. Container is at: ./vsoch-hello-world-master.img

In this example, the first build of this container will be pulled.

Docker¶

Docker pull is similar (on the surface) to a Singularity Hub pull, and we would do the following:

singularity pull docker://ubuntu

Initializing Singularity image subsystem

Opening image file: ubuntu.img

Creating 223MiB image

Binding image to loop

Creating file system within image

Image is done: ubuntu.img

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker

Importing: base Singularity environment

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:b6f892c0043b37bd1834a4a1b7d68fe6421c6acbc7e7e63a4527e1d379f92c1b.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:55010f332b047687e081a9639fac04918552c144bc2da4edb3422ce8efcc1fb1.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:2955fb827c947b782af190a759805d229cfebc75978dba2d01b4a59e6a333845.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:3deef3fcbd3072b45771bd0d192d4e5ff2b7310b99ea92bce062e01097953505.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:cf9722e506aada1109f5c00a9ba542a81c9e109606c01c81f5991b1f93de7b66.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/metadata/sha256:fe44851d529f465f9aa107b32351c8a0a722fc0619a2a7c22b058084fac068a4.tar.gz

Done. Container is at: ubuntu.img

If you specify the tag, the image would be named accordingly (eg, ubuntu-latest.img). Did you notice that the output looks similar to if we did the following?

singularity create ubuntu.img

singularity import ubuntu.img docker://ubuntu

this is because the same logic is happening on the back end. Thus, the pull command with a docker uri also supports arguments --size and --name . Here is how I would pull an ubuntu image, but make it bigger, and name it something else.

singularity pull --size 2000 --name jellybelly.img docker://ubuntu

Initializing Singularity image subsystem

Opening image file: jellybelly.img

Creating 2000MiB image

Binding image to loop

Creating file system within image

Image is done: jellybelly.img

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker

Importing: base Singularity environment

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:b6f892c0043b37bd1834a4a1b7d68fe6421c6acbc7e7e63a4527e1d379f92c1b.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:55010f332b047687e081a9639fac04918552c144bc2da4edb3422ce8efcc1fb1.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:2955fb827c947b782af190a759805d229cfebc75978dba2d01b4a59e6a333845.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:3deef3fcbd3072b45771bd0d192d4e5ff2b7310b99ea92bce062e01097953505.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:cf9722e506aada1109f5c00a9ba542a81c9e109606c01c81f5991b1f93de7b66.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/metadata/sha256:fe44851d529f465f9aa107b32351c8a0a722fc0619a2a7c22b058084fac068a4.tar.gz

Done. Container is at: jellybelly.img

run¶

It’s common to want your container to “do a thing.” Singularity run allows you to define a custom action to be taken when a container is either run or executed directly by file name. Specifically, you might want it to execute a command, or run an executable that gives access to many different functions for the user.

Overview¶

First, how do we run a container? We can do that in one of two ways - the commands below are identical:

$ singularity run centos7.img

$ ./centos7.img

In both cases, we are executing the container’s “runscript” (the executable /singularity at the root of the image) that is either an actual file (version 2.2 and earlier) or a link to one (2.3 and later). For example, looking at a 2.3 image, I can see the runscript via the path to the link:

$ singularity exec centos7.img cat /singularity

#!/bin/sh

exec /bin/bash "$@"

or to the actual file in the container’s metadata folder, /.singularity.d

$ singularity exec centos7.img cat /.singularity.d/runscript

#!/bin/sh

exec /bin/bash "$@"

Notice how the runscript has bash followed by \$@ ? This is good practice to include in a runscript, as any arguments passed by the user will be given to the container.

Runtime Flags¶

If you are interested in containing an environment or filesystem locations, we highly recommend that you look at the singularity run help and our documentation on flags to better customize this command.

Examples¶

In this example the container has a very simple runscript defined.

$ singularity exec centos7.img cat /singularity

#!/bin/sh

echo motorbot

$ singularity run centos7.img

motorbot

Defining the Runscript¶

When you first create a container, the runscript is defined using the following order of operations:

A user defined runscript in the %runscript section of a bootstrap takes preference over all
If the user has not defined a runscript and is importing a Docker container, the Docker ENTRYPOINT is used.
If a user has not defined a runscript and adds IncludeCmd: yes to the bootstrap file, the CMD is used over the ENTRYPOINT
If the user has not defined a runscript and the Docker container

doesn’t have an ENTRYPOINT, we look for CMD, even if the user hasn’t asked for it.

If the user has not defined a runscript, and there is no ENTRYPOINT or CMD (or we aren’t importing Docker at all) then we default to /bin/bash

Here is how you would define the runscript section when you build an image:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu:latest

%runscript

exec /usr/bin/python "$@"

and of course python should be installed as /usr/bin/python. The addition of $@ ensures that arguments are passed along from the user. If you want your container to run absolutely any command given to it, and you want to use run instead of exec, you could also just do:

Bootstrap: docker

From: ubuntu:latest

%runscript

exec "$@"`

If you want different entrypoints for your image, we recommend using the %apprun syntax (see apps). Here we have two entrypoints for foo and bar:

%runscript

exec echo "Try running with --app dog/cat"

%apprun dog

exec echo Hello "$@", this is Dog

%apprun cat

exec echo Meow "$@", this is Cat

and then running (after build of a complete recipe) would look like:

sudo singularity build catdog.simg Singularity

$ singularity run catdog.simg

Try running with --app dog/cat

$ singularity run --app cat catdog.simg

Meow , this is Cat

$ singularity run --app dog catdog.simg

Hello , this is Dog

Generally, it is advised to provide help for your container with %help or %apphelp. If you find it easier, you can also provide help by way of a runscript that tells your user how to use the container, and gives access to the important executables. Regardless of your strategy. a reproducible container is one that tells the user how to interact with it.

shell¶

The shell Singularity sub-command will automatically spawn an interactive shell within a container. As of v2.3 the default that is spawned via the shell command is /bin/bash if it exists otherwise /bin/sh is called.

$ singularity shell

USAGE: singularity (options) shell [container image] (options)

Here we can see the default shell in action:

$ singularity shell centos7.img

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity centos7.img:~> echo $SHELL

/bin/bash

Additionally any arguments passed to the Singularity command (after the container name) will be passed to the called shell within the container, and shell can be used across image types. Here is a quick example of shelling into a container assembled from Docker layers. We highly recommend that you look at the singularity shell help and our documentation on flags to better customize this command.

Change your shell¶

The shell sub-command allows you to set or change the default shell using the --shell argument. As of Singularity version 2.2, you can also use the environment variable SINGULARITY_SHELL which will use that as your shell entry point into the container.

Bash¶

The correct way to do it:

export SINGULARITY_SHELL="/bin/bash --norc"

singularity shell centos7.img Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

Singularity centos7.img:~/Desktop> echo $SHELL

/bin/bash --norc

Don’t do this, it can be confusing:

$ export SINGULARITY_SHELL=/bin/bash

$ singularity shell centos7.img

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

# What? We are still on my Desktop? Actually no, but the uri says we are!

vanessa@vanessa-ThinkPad-T460s:~/Desktop$ echo $SHELL

/bin/bash

Depending on your shell, you might also want the --noprofile flag. How can you learn more about a shell? Ask it for help, of course!

Shell Help¶

$ singularity shell centos7.img --help

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

GNU bash, version 4.2.46(1)-release-(x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu)

Usage:  /bin/bash [GNU long option] [option] ...

    /bin/bash [GNU long option] [option] script-file ...

GNU long options:

    --debug

    --debugger

    --dump-po-strings

    --dump-strings

    --help

    --init-file

    --login

    --noediting

    --noprofile

    --norc

    --posix

    --protected

    --rcfile

    --rpm-requires

    --restricted

    --verbose

    --version

Shell options:

    -irsD or -c command or -O shopt_option      (invocation only)

    -abefhkmnptuvxBCHP or -o option

Type `/bin/bash -c "help set"' for more information about shell options.

Type `/bin/bash -c help' for more information about shell builtin commands.

And thus we should be able to do:

$ singularity shell centos7.img -c "echo hello world"

Singularity: Invoking an interactive shell within container...

hello world

Image Command Group¶

image.export¶

Export is a way to dump the contents of your container into a .tar.gz, or a stream to put into some other place. For example, you could stream this into an in memory tar in python. Importantly, this command was originally intended for Singularity version less than 2.4 in the case of exporting an ext3 filesystem. For Singularity greater than 2.4, the resulting export file is likely to be larger than the original squashfs counterpart. An example with an ext3 image is provided.

Here we export an image into a .tar file:

singularity image.export container.img > container.tar

We can also specify the file with --file

singularity image.export --file container.tar container.img

And here is the recommended way to compress your image:

singularity image.export container.img | gzip -9 > container.img.tar.gz

image.expand¶

While the squashfs filesystem means that you typically don’t need to worry about the size of your container being built, you might find that if you are building an ext3 image (pre Singularity 2.4) you want to expand it.

Increasing the size of an existing image¶

You can increase the size of an image after it has been instantiated by using the image.expand Singularity sub-command. In the example below, we:

create an empty image
inspect it’s size
expand it
confirm it’s larger

$ singularity image.create container.img

Creating empty 768MiB image file: container.imglarity image.create container.im

Formatting image with ext3 file system

Image is done: container.img

$ ls -lh container.img

-rw-rw-r-- 1 vanessa vanessa 768M Oct  2 18:48 container.img

$ singularity image.expand container.img

Expanding image by 768MB

Checking image's file system

e2fsck 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)

Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes

Pass 2: Checking directory structure

Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity

Pass 4: Checking reference counts

Pass 5: Checking group summary information

container.img: 11/49152 files (0.0% non-contiguous), 7387/196608 blocks

Resizing image's file system

resize2fs 1.42.13 (17-May-2015)

Resizing the filesystem on container.img to 393216 (4k) blocks.

The filesystem on container.img is now 393216 (4k) blocks long.

Image is done: container.img

$ ls -lh container.img

-rw-rw-r-- 1 vanessa vanessa 1.5G Oct  2 18:48 container.img

Similar to the create sub-command, you can override the default size increase (which is 768MiB) by using the --size option.

image.import¶

Singularity import is essentially taking a dump of files and folders and adding them to your image. This works for local compressed things (e.g., tar.gz) but also for docker image layers that you don’t have on your system. As of version 2.3, import of docker layers includes the environment and metadata without needing sudo. It’s generally very intuitive.

As an example, here is a common use case: wanting to import a Docker image:

singularity image.import container.img docker://ubuntu:latest

image.create¶

A Singularity image, which can be referred to as a “container,” is a single file that contains a virtual file system. As of Singularity 2.4, we strongly recommend that you build (create and install) an image using build. If you have reason to create an empty image, or use create for any other reason, the original create command is replaced with a more specific image.create. After creating an image you can install an operating system, applications, and save meta-data with it.

Whereas Docker assembles images from layers that are stored on your computer (viewed with the docker history command), a Singularity image is just one file that can sit on your Desktop, in a folder on your cluster, or anywhere. Having Singularity containers housed within a single image file greatly simplifies management tasks such as sharing, copying, and branching your containers. It also means that standard Linux file system concepts like permissions, ownership, and ACLs apply to the container (e.g. I can give read only access to a colleague, or block access completely with a simple chmod command).

Creating a new blank Singularity container image¶

Singularity will create a default container image of 768MiB using the following command:
singularity image.create container.img

Creating empty 768MiB image file: container.img

Formatting image with ext3 file system

Image is done: container.img
How big is it?
$ du -sh container.img

29M     container.img
Create will make an ext3 filesystem. Let’s create and import a docker base (the pre-2.4 way with two commands), and then compare to just building (one command) from the same base.
singularity create container.img

sudo singularity bootstrap container.img docker://ubuntu


...


$ du -sh container.img

769M
Prior to 2.4, you would need to provide a --size to change from the default:
$ singularity create --size 2048 container2.img

Initializing Singularity image subsystem

Opening image file: container2.img

Creating 2048MiB image

Binding image to loop

Creating file system within image

Image is done: container2.img


$ ls -lh container*.img

-rwxr-xr-x 1 user group 2.1G Apr 15 11:34 container2.img

-rwxr-xr-x 1 user group 769M Apr 15 11:11 container.img
Now let’s compare to if we just built, without needing to specify a size.
sudo singularity build container.simg docker://ubuntu


...


du -sh container.simg

45M container.simg

Quite a difference! And one command instead of one.

Overwriting an image with a new one¶

For any commands that If you have already created an image and wish to overwrite it, you can do so with the --force option.
$ singularity image.create container.img

ERROR: Image file exists, not overwriting.



$ singularity image.create --force container.img

Creating empty 768MiB image file: container.img

Formatting image with ext3 file system

Image is done: container.img
@GodLoveD has provided a nice interactive demonstration of creating an image (pre 2.4).

Instance Command Group¶

instance.start¶

New in Singularity version 2.4 you can use the instance command group to run instances of containers in the background. This is useful for running services like databases and web servers. The instance.start command lets you initiate a named instance in the background.

Overview¶

To initiate a named instance of a container, you must call the instance.start command with 2 arguments: the name of the container that you want to start and a unique name for an instance of that container. Once the new instance is running, you can join the container’s namespace using a URI style syntax like so:

$ singularity shell instance://<instance_name>

You can specify options such as bind mounts, overlays, or custom namespaces when you initiate a new instance of a container with instance.start. These options will persist as long as the container runs.

For a complete list of options see the output of:

singularity help instance.start

Examples¶

These examples use a container from Singularity Hub, but you can use local containers or containers from Docker Hub as well. For a more detailed look at instance usage see Running Instances.

Start an instance called cow1 from a container on Singularity Hub¶

$ singularity instance.start shub://GodloveD/lolcow cow1

Start an interactive shell within the instance that you just started¶

$ singularity shell instance://cow1

Singularity GodloveD-lolcow-master.img:~> ps -ef

UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD

ubuntu       1     0  0 20:03 ?        00:00:00 singularity-instance: ubuntu [cow1]

ubuntu       3     0  0 20:04 pts/0    00:00:00 /bin/bash --norc

ubuntu       4     3  0 20:04 pts/0    00:00:00 ps -ef

Singularity GodloveD-lolcow-master.img:~> exit

Execute the runscript within the instance¶

$ singularity run instance://cow1

 _________________________________________

/ Clothes make the man. Naked people have \

| little or no influence on society.      |

|                                         |

\ -- Mark Twain                           /

 -----------------------------------------

        \   ^__^

         \  (oo)\_______

            (__)\       )\/\

                ||----w |

                ||     ||

Run a command within a running instance¶

$ singularity exec instance://cow1 cowsay "I like blending into the background"

 _____________________________________

< I like blending into the background >

 -------------------------------------

        \   ^__^

         \  (oo)\_______

            (__)\       )\/\

                ||----w |

                ||     ||

instance.list¶

New in Singularity version 2.4 you can use the instance command group to run instances of containers in the background. This is useful for running services like databases and web servers. The instance.list command lets you keep track of the named instances running in the background.

Overview¶

After initiating one or more named instances to run in the background with the instance.start command you can list them with the instance.list command.

Examples¶

These examples use a container from Singularity Hub, but you can use local containers or containers from Docker Hub as well. For a more detailed look at instance usage see Running Instances.

Start a few named instances from containers on Singularity Hub¶

$ singularity instance.start shub://GodloveD/lolcow cow1

$ singularity instance.start shub://GodloveD/lolcow cow2

$ singularity instance.start shub://vsoch/hello-world hiya

List running instances¶

$ singularity instance.list

DAEMON NAME      PID      CONTAINER IMAGE

cow1             20522    /home/ubuntu/GodloveD-lolcow-master.img

cow2             20558    /home/ubuntu/GodloveD-lolcow-master.img

hiya             20595    /home/ubuntu/vsoch-hello-world-master.img

instance.stop¶

New in Singularity version 2.4 you can use the instance command group to run instances of containers in the background. This is useful for running services like databases and web servers. The instance.stop command lets you stop instances once you are finished using them

Overview¶

After initiating one or more named instances to run in the background with the instance.start command you can stop them with the instance.stop command.

Examples¶

These examples use a container from Singularity Hub, but you can use local containers or containers from Docker Hub as well. For a more detailed look at instance usage see Running Instances.

Start a few named instances from containers on Singularity Hub¶

$ singularity instance.start shub://GodloveD/lolcow cow1

$ singularity instance.start shub://GodloveD/lolcow cow2

$ singularity instance.start shub://vsoch/hello-world hiya

Stop a single instance¶

$ singularity instance.stop cow1

Stopping cow1 instance of /home/ubuntu/GodloveD-lolcow-master.img (PID=20522)

Stop all running instances¶

$ singularity instance.stop --all

Stopping cow2 instance of /home/ubuntu/GodloveD-lolcow-master.img (PID=20558)

Stopping hiya instance of /home/ubuntu/vsoch-hello-world-master.img (PID=20595)

Deprecated¶

bootstrap¶

Bootstrapping was the original way (for Singularity versions prior to 2.4) to install an operating system and then configure it appropriately for a specified need. Bootstrap is very similar to build, except that it by default uses an ext3 filesystem and allows for writability. The images unfortunately are not immutable in this way, and can degrade over time. As of 2.4, bootstrap is still supported for Singularity, however we encourage you to use build instead.

Quick Start¶

A bootstrap is done based on a Singularity recipe file (a text file called Singularity) that describes how to specifically build the container. Here we will overview the sections, best practices, and a quick example.

$ singularity bootstrap

USAGE: singularity [...] bootstrap <container path> <definition file>

The <container path> is the path to the Singularity image file, and the <definition file> is the location of the definition file (the recipe) we will use to create this container. The process of building a container should always be done by root so that the correct file ownership and permissions are maintained. Also, so installation programs check to ensure they are the root user before proceeding. The bootstrap process may take anywhere from one minute to one hour depending on what needs to be done and how fast your network connection is.

Let’s continue with our quick start example. Here is your spec file, Singularity ,

Bootstrap:docker

From:ubuntu:latest

You next create an image:

$ singularity image.create ubuntu.img

Initializing Singularity image subsystem

Opening image file: ubuntu.img

Creating 768MiB image

Binding image to loop

Creating file system within image

Image is done: ubuntu.img

and finally run the bootstrap command, pointing to your image ( <container path> ) and the file Singularity ( <definition file> ).

$ sudo singularity bootstrap ubuntu.img Singularity

Sanitizing environment

Building from bootstrap definition recipe

Adding base Singularity environment to container

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /root/.singularity/docker

[5/5] |===================================| 100.0%

Exploding layer: sha256:b6f892c0043b37bd1834a4a1b7d68fe6421c6acbc7e7e63a4527e1d379f92c1b.tar.gz

Exploding layer: sha256:55010f332b047687e081a9639fac04918552c144bc2da4edb3422ce8efcc1fb1.tar.gz

Exploding layer: sha256:2955fb827c947b782af190a759805d229cfebc75978dba2d01b4a59e6a333845.tar.gz

Exploding layer: sha256:3deef3fcbd3072b45771bd0d192d4e5ff2b7310b99ea92bce062e01097953505.tar.gz

Exploding layer: sha256:cf9722e506aada1109f5c00a9ba542a81c9e109606c01c81f5991b1f93de7b66.tar.gz

Exploding layer: sha256:fe44851d529f465f9aa107b32351c8a0a722fc0619a2a7c22b058084fac068a4.tar.gz

Finalizing Singularity container

Notice that bootstrap does require sudo. If you do an import, with a docker uri for example, you would see a similar flow, but the calling user would be you, and the cache your $HOME.

$ singularity image.create ubuntu.img

singularity import ubuntu.img docker://ubuntu:latest

Docker image path: index.docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest

Cache folder set to /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker

Importing: base Singularity environment

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:b6f892c0043b37bd1834a4a1b7d68fe6421c6acbc7e7e63a4527e1d379f92c1b.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:55010f332b047687e081a9639fac04918552c144bc2da4edb3422ce8efcc1fb1.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:2955fb827c947b782af190a759805d229cfebc75978dba2d01b4a59e6a333845.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:3deef3fcbd3072b45771bd0d192d4e5ff2b7310b99ea92bce062e01097953505.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/docker/sha256:cf9722e506aada1109f5c00a9ba542a81c9e109606c01c81f5991b1f93de7b66.tar.gz

Importing: /home/vanessa/.singularity/metadata/sha256:fe44851d529f465f9aa107b32351c8a0a722fc0619a2a7c22b058084fac068a4.tar.gz

For details and best practices for creating your Singularity recipe, read about them here.

User Guide¶

Quick Start¶

Installation¶

Overview of the Singularity Interface¶

Download pre-built images¶

Interact with images¶

Shell¶

Executing Commands¶

Running a container¶

Working with Files¶

Build images from scratch¶

Sandbox Directory¶

Writable Image¶

Converting images from one format to another¶

Singularity Recipes¶

Introduction¶

Welcome to Singularity!¶

Mobility of Compute¶

Reproducibility¶

User Freedom¶

Support on Existing Traditional HPC¶

A High Level View of Singularity¶

Security and privilege escalation¶

The Singularity container image¶

Copying, sharing, branching, and distributing your image¶

Supported container formats¶

Supported URIs¶

Name-spaces and isolation¶

Compatibility with standard work-flows, pipes and IO¶

The Singularity Process Flow¶

The Singularity Usage Workflow¶

Singularity Commands¶

Support¶

Installation¶

Before you begin¶

Install the master branch¶

Install a specific release¶

Install the development branch¶

Remove an old version¶

Build a Container¶

Overview¶

Downloading a existing container from Singularity Hub¶

Downloading a existing container from Docker Hub¶

Creating --writable images and --sandbox directories¶

--writable¶

--sandbox¶

Converting containers from one format to another¶

Building containers from Singularity recipe files¶

--force¶

--section¶

--notest¶

--checks¶

More Build topics¶

Build Environment¶

Cache Folders¶

Temporary Folders¶

Pull Folder¶

Environment Variables¶

Cache¶

Defaults¶

Docker¶

Singularity Hub¶

General¶

Container Recipes¶

Overview¶

Header¶

Sections¶

%help¶

%setup¶

%files¶

%labels¶

%environment¶

%post¶

%runscript¶

%test¶

Apps¶

Examples¶

Best Practices for Build Recipes¶

Singularity Flow¶

Building Images¶

Creating `--writable` images and `--sandbox` directories¶

`--writable`¶

`--sandbox`¶

`--force`¶

`--section`¶

`--notest`¶

`--checks`¶