Installing Singularity on Windows Workstations

Singularity is a container-based runtime engine designed to run in permission constrained environments. Singularity provides similar functions to systems like Docker, Containerd, and Podman, and provides an ecosystem to share a computer’s kernel and drivers and provide a filesystem based on overlaying files. These overlays create a type of partitioned software that that can create isolated execution on the host as a type of “container”.

However, Singularity differs from typical container runtime engine, most notably:

1. Singularity was designed to be run as a normal, non-root user and does not depend on a daemon.
2. Singularity does not natively support OCI images (the typical container image format target), and uses its own SIF format; but OCI images can be imported.
3. Singularity container images are distributed as files.
4. Singularity was designed to create a container platform that works from laptops to HPC clusters.

(Windows Only) Setup on Window Subsystem for Linux

While not the normal place to install singularity, it is useful to have the ability to run commands from a local machine to validate command structure and workflows. Singularity does not run natively on windows, but with Windows 10 Professional, you can build Singularity using a WSL2 distribution and provide the ability to run the commands on your workstation.

Enabling WSL2

To enable WSL2, follow microsoft’s instructions

• Windows 10/11 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
• Windows 10 older than 2004 - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-manual

Any version of linux will work with Singularity, but we recommend using Ubuntu.

Building Singularity

This process has been automated in ./tools/install-singularity-wsl2.bash if you’re running Ubuntu. However, the general flow of the instruction is:

1. Install the singularity code dependencies (gcc, libssl, gpgme, squashfs, seccomp, wget, pkg-config, git, and cryptsetup)
2. Install a modern version of golang.
3. Download the Singularity source code from https://github.com/apptainer/singularity.git
4. Run ./mconfig from the singularity codebase
5. Run make && make install from the ./builddir directory.

These procedures are more thoroughly covered in the apptainer website at: https://apptainer.org/docs/user/main/quick_start.html#quick-installation-steps

Run your first singularity container

Once the build has completed, you should be able to run the singularity command. Try to run

$ singularity run docker://godlovedc/lolcow

If this command was successful you should see something similar to the following:

 _____________________________________
/ You recoil from the crude; you tend \
\ naturally toward the exquisite.     /
 -------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||