Singularity Deploy

Wouldn't it be nice to build Singularity images without a registry proper, and just keep them alongside the GitHub codebase? This is now possible! This small repository provides an example to get you started. It will build one or more images (whatever Singularity.* files that are present at the root) and then release them as assets to your GitHub repository so that they can be programatically obtained. It is associated with singularity-hpc to allow you to then define LMOD modules for these same containers.

Can I upload the largest of chonkers?

Yes and no. Note that assets are limited to 2 GB in size, which is still fairly good. You can use it as a template for your own recipes as is, or modify it for your custom use case. Instructions are below!

Getting Started

1. Template or Fork

If you haven't already, template or fork this repository. You can then clone your fork:

$ git clone git@github.com:<username>/singularity-deploy

You likely want to name the repository by the container. For example, if I would have created a container on Docker Hub or similar with the name vsoch/salad, here I'd call the repository salad. You obviously are limited to your username or an organizational namespace.

1. Write your Singularity Recipe(s)

First, you should write your container recipe(s) in the present working directory. For good practice, when you are updating recipes you should checkout a new branch and open a pull request, as the repository comes with a workflow to trigger on a PR to test your container build. You can add any additional tests that that you might need. By default, any Singularity.* file will be automatically detected. If there is no extension (the name Singularity), the name used will be "latest." You can use these tags across multiple releases of your containers. For example, these files would generate packages with sifs named as follows:

• Singularity maps to https://github.com/singularityhub/singularity-deploy/releases/download/0.0.1/singularityhub-singularity-deploy.latest.sif
• Singularity.pokemon maps to https://github.com/singularityhub/singularity-deploy/releases/download/0.0.1/singularityhub-singularity-deploy.pokemon.sif
• Singularity.salad maps to https://github.com/singularityhub/singularity-deploy/releases/download/0.0.1/singularityhub-singularity-deploy.latest.sif

For each name, you can see the direct download URL contains the repository (singularityhub/singularity-deploy), You should not use any : characters in either your container tag (the GitHub extension) or the GitHub tags (the release tags) as this might interfere with parsing. The GitHub release tag (0.0.1 in the example above) is discussed next.

2. Update the VERSION file

Any time that you prepare new container recipes, you should update the VERSION file. The way that this repository works is to generate a release based on the string in VERSION. A version is just a tag, so it could be something like 0.0.1 or 0.0.1-slim. Keep in mind that GitHub releases cannot have duplicated names, so you should not repeat the same tag. Do not use : in your tag names. If you do need to re-release a tag (not recommended if a user might be using it and then it's changed) you can manually delete the release and the tag in the GitHub interface. This is a nice structure because it means you can have containers with different names under the same tag. In the example above, we have each of "deploy," "latest," and "salad" released under tag 0.0.1. This is how it looks on GitHub:

3. How to Develop

As we mentioned previously, the container builds will be tested on a pull request, and the release will trigger on merge into your main branch (main). See the .github/workflows/builder.yml) to edit this. The idea is that you can:

1. Develop your container via a development branch
2. Open a pull request to test the container (the .github/workflows/test.yml)
3. On merge, your container will be released!

4. How to pull

Technically, Singularity can pull just knowing the URL. For example:

$ singularity pull https://github.com/singularityhub/singularity-deploy/releases/download/0.0.1/singularityhub-singularity-deploy.latest.sif

However, the singularity-hpc tool (will be) designed to be able to parse and handle these container uris automatically. For the containers here, you could do:

$ shpc pull gh://singularityhub/singularity-deploy/0.0.1:latest
$ shpc pull gh://singularityhub/singularity-deploy/0.0.1:salad
$ shpc pull gh://singularityhub/singularity-deploy/0.0.1:pokemon

or write the container URI into a registry entry:

gh: singularityhub/singularity-deploy
latest:
  latest: "0.0.1"
tags:
  "latest": "0.0.1"
  "salad": "0.0.1"
  "pokemon": "0.0.1"
maintainer: "@vsoch"
url: https://github.com/singularityhub/singularity-deploy

(This part is still under development!)