Build from a local docker image

singularity build <image_name.sif> docker-daemon://<docker_image>:<tag>

Another option is to transcribe Dockerfile to definition file:

# You need to pip install spython first
$ spython recipe Dockerfile &> Singularity.def

But I found it not to work properly.

Run command

What I frequently use:

• --nv: allow access to gpus
• -C or --containall: isolate filesystem, PID, IPC, and environment variables from host
• -B <src>:<dest> or --bind <src>:<dest>: same as -v (mount) in docker. src is the path on the host, dest is the path in the container
• --pwd <path>: specify working directory (NOTE: confusingly, --workdir is for something different)
• --fakeroot: run container in new user namespace as uid 0

singularity run --fakeroot --nv --containall -B <source-path>:<target-path> --pwd <default_dir> <sif_file> bash -c '<cmd>'

Persistent Overlays

When I use mujoco_py (I still use MuJoCo v2.0), it attempts to create a lock file at /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/mujoco_py/generated/mujocopy-buildlock, and fails with:

>>> import mujoco_py
...
OSError: [Errno 30] Read-only file system: b'/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/mujoco_py/generated/mujocopy-buildlock'

Previously I avoided this with Persistent Overlays.
Recently I've learned that by simply adding --writable-tmpfs at runtime is enough.
I can just do singularity run --writable-tmpfs d4rl.sif bash and mujoco_py works fine.

$ singularity run --nv --containall --writable-tmpfs robosuite.sif bash
Apptainer> ls -lah /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/mujoco_py/generated/mujocopy-buildlock
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nogroup 0 Aug 15 20:49 /usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/mujoco_py/generated/mujocopy-buildlock
Apptainer> id
uid=1002(ripl) gid=1002(ripl) groups=1002(ripl),65534(nogroup)
Apptainer> whoami
ripl
Apptainer> groups
ripl nogroup
Apptainer> id nobody
uid=65534(nobody) gid=65534(nogroup) groups=65534(nogroup)

Hmmm this time using --writable-tmpfs didn't solve it:

>>> import mujoco_py
...
OSError: [Errno 95] Operation not supported: b'/usr/local/lib/python3.8/dist-packages/mujoco_py/generated/mujocopy-buildlock'

It seems like the issue of FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace). A website by Microsoft says:

Direct appends and random writes are not supported in FUSE v2
In this case, I needed to use Persistent Overlay.

$ mkdir -p overlay/upper
$ mkdir overlay/work
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=overlay.img bs=1M count=500 && mkfs.ext3 -d overlay overlay.img
$ singularity shell --overlay overlay.img ubuntu.sif

Issues I had:

How to copy an entire directory to singularity container at build time