Singularity applications

Singularity is a container framework designed for HPC which resolve a number of security issues usually associated with Docker. It is here utilized to make an environment modules oriented proof-of-concept container package system using singularity containers as lightweight snap or flatpak applications.

Applications

• Editors / IDEs

  • Atom
  • Sublime Text
  • Visual Studio Code

• Windows

  • wine

! Note there are issues in the initial commit which means some functionality may be unavailable in the applications.

Howto install

Install requirements

The requirements are:

• Singularity v3.5+
• Lmod

On CentOS 7 install the following packages

yum install Lmod singularity

Clone the repo

mkdir -p ~/local
cd local
git clone https://github.com/lmelwyn/sapps.git

Build the containers

The repoitory does not contain the singularity containers and the application definition <app>.def files must be used to build the various containers using the singularity build command or using the Makefile in ./sapps subdirs, e.g.

cd sapps/ide
sudo make

Alternatively, reconfigure the various Makefiles in order to use the --fakeroot feature.

Note that eventhough the current setup requires privileged access in order to build the containers the idea is to build those separately as a part of a CI/CD workflow and eventually to replace the make with a pull from existing docker or singularity registries.

Define the application path SAPP_PATH

Export the singularity applications path (SAPP_PATH) environment variable to be the local install path, e.g.

export SAPP_PATH=~/local/sapps

or add the export command to bash resource file .bashrc.

echo 'export SAPP_PATH=~/local/sapps' >> ~/.bashrc

Enable the modules path

module use -a $SAPP_PATH/modules

or add to the bash resource file .bashrc

echo 'module use -a $SAPP_PATH/modules' >> .bashrc

Check applications availability

module --ignore_cache avail

Load the application

In order to load and run Visual Studio Code editor do

module load ide/vscode
code