Since you are reading this from the Apptainer source code, it will be assumed that you are building/compiling from source.
For more complete instructions on installation options, including options that install Apptainer from pre-compiled binaries, please check the installation section of the admin guide.
You must first install development tools and libraries to your host.
On Debian-based systems, including Ubuntu:
# Ensure repositories are up-to-date
sudo apt-get update
# Install debian packages for dependencies
sudo apt-get install -y \
build-essential \
libseccomp-dev \
pkg-config \
uidmap \
squashfs-tools \
fakeroot \
cryptsetup \
tzdata \
curl wget git
On CentOS/RHEL:
# Install basic tools for compiling
sudo yum groupinstall -y 'Development Tools'
# Ensure EPEL repository is available
sudo yum install -y epel-release
# Install RPM packages for dependencies
sudo yum install -y \
libseccomp-devel \
squashfs-tools \
fakeroot \
cryptsetup \
wget git
On SLE/openSUSE
# Install RPM packages for dependencies
sudo zypper install -y \
libseccomp-devel \
libuuid-devel \
openssl-devel \
cryptsetup sysuser-tools \
gcc go
Apptainer is written in Go, and may require a newer version of Go than is available in the repositories of your distribution. We recommend installing the latest version of Go from the official binaries.
First, download the Go tar.gz archive to /tmp
, then extract the archive to
/usr/local
.
NOTE: if you are updating Go from a older version, make sure you remove
/usr/local/go
before reinstalling it.
export GOVERSION=1.20.10 OS=linux ARCH=amd64 # change this as you need
wget -O /tmp/go${GOVERSION}.${OS}-${ARCH}.tar.gz \
https://dl.google.com/go/go${GOVERSION}.${OS}-${ARCH}.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf /tmp/go${GOVERSION}.${OS}-${ARCH}.tar.gz
Finally, add /usr/local/go/bin
to the PATH
environment variable:
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
If you will be making changes to the source code, and submitting PRs, you should
install golangci-lint
, which is the linting tool used in the Apptainer
project to ensure code consistency.
Every pull request must pass the golangci-lint
checks, and these will be run
automatically before attempting to merge the code. If you are modifying
Apptainer and contributing your changes to the repository, it's faster to run
these checks locally before uploading your pull request.
In order to download and install the latest version of golangci-lint
, you can
run:
curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golangci/golangci-lint/master/install.sh | sh -s -- -b $(go env GOPATH)/bin v1.51.1
Add $(go env GOPATH)
to the PATH
environment variable:
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
With the adoption of Go modules you no longer need to clone the Apptainer repository to a specific location.
Clone the repository with git
in a location of your choice:
git clone https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer.git
cd apptainer
By default your clone will be on the main
branch which is where development
of Apptainer happens.
To build a specific version of Apptainer, check out a
release tag before compiling,
for example:
git checkout v1.3.0-rc.2
You can configure, build, and install Apptainer using the following commands:
./mconfig
cd $(/bin/pwd)/builddir
make
sudo make install
And that's it! Now you can check your Apptainer version by running:
apptainer --version
The mconfig
command accepts options that can modify the build and installation
of Apptainer. For example, to build in a different folder and to set the
install prefix to a different path:
./mconfig -b ./buildtree -p /usr/local
If you want a setuid-installation (formerly the default) use the
--with-suid
option.
See the output of ./mconfig -h
for available options.
In many cases Apptainer uses FUSE-based packages in order to mount filesystems. Very often these packages are available in Linux distributions but out of date for Apptainer needs, so they need to be compiled and installed with Apptainer following these directions.
First, make sure that additional required packages are installed. On Debian:
sudo apt-get install -y autoconf automake libtool pkg-config libfuse3-dev zlib1g-dev
On CentOS/RHEL:
sudo yum install -y autoconf automake libtool pkgconfig fuse3-devel zlib-devel
To download the source code from the top level of the Apptainer source tree do:
./scripts/download-dependencies
Then to compile and install do this:
./scripts/compile-dependencies
sudo ./scripts/install-dependencies
On a RHEL / CentOS / Fedora machine you can build an Apptainer into rpm
packages, and install it from them. This is useful if you need to install
Apptainer across multiple machines, or wish to manage all software via
yum/dnf
.
To build the rpms, in addition to the system dependencies and the extra required packages needed for dependent FUSE-based packages, also install these extra packages:
sudo yum install -y rpm-build golang
The rpm build will use the OS distribution or EPEL version of Go,
or it will use a different installation of Go, whichever is first in $PATH.
If the first go
found in $PATH is too old,
then the rpm build uses that older version to compile the newer go
toolchain from source.
This mechanism is necessary for rpm build systems that do not allow
downloading anything from the internet.
In order to make use of this mechanism, use the mconfig --only-rpm
option
to skip the minimum version check.
mconfig
will then create a .spec
file that looks for a go source
tarball in the rpm build's current directory.
If you need it, download the go tarball:
wget https://dl.google.com/go/go$(scripts/get-min-go-version).src.tar.gz
Then download the latest apptainer release tarball:
VERSION=1.3.0-rc.2 # this is the apptainer version, change as you need
# Fetch the source
wget https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer/releases/download/v${VERSION}/apptainer-${VERSION}.tar.gz
Next download the source for the FUSE-based dependencies:
tar xvf apptainer-${VERSION}.tar.gz apptainer-${VERSION}/scripts
tar xvf apptainer-${VERSION}.tar.gz apptainer-${VERSION}/dist/rpm
cd apptainer-${VERSION}
./scripts/download-dependencies ..
cd ..
rm -rf apptainer-${VERSION}
Then build the rpms from the tarball:
rpmbuild -tb apptainer-${VERSION}.tar.gz
# Install Apptainer using the resulting rpm
RPMVERSION="$(scripts/rpm-version "${VERSION}")"
sudo rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/apptainer-${RPMVERSION}-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
# (Optionally) Install the setuid-root portion
sudo rpm -Uvh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/apptainer-suid-${RPMVERSION}-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
# (Optionally) Remove the build tree, source, and dependencies
rm -rf ~/rpmbuild apptainer-${VERSION}.tar.gz
./scripts/clean-dependencies
Alternatively, to build RPMs from the latest source code you can
clone the repo as detailed above, and run ./mconfig
.
Then use the rpm
make target to build Apptainer as rpm packages,
for example like this if you already have a new enough golang first
in your PATH:
./mconfig
./scripts/download-dependencies
make -C builddir rpm
VERSION="$(scripts/get-version)"
RPMVERSION="$(scripts/rpm-version ${VERSION})"
sudo rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/apptainer-${RPMVERSION}-1.x86_64.rpm
# (Optionally) Install the setuid-root portion
sudo rpm -ivh ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/apptainer-suid-${RPMVERSION}-1.x86_64.rpm
# (Optionally) Remove the build tree, source, and dependency sources
rm -rf ~/rpmbuild apptainer-${VERSION}.tar.gz
./scripts/clean-dependencies
By default, the rpms will be built so that Apptainer is installed in
standard Linux paths under /
.
To build rpms with an alternative install prefix set RPMPREFIX on the make step, for example:
make -C builddir rpm RPMPREFIX=/opt/apptainer
For more information on installing/updating/uninstalling RPMs, check out our admin docs.
Information on how to build Debian packages can be found in dist/debian/DEBIAN_PACKAGE.md.
The test suite is heavily relying on Docker Hub registry, since the introduction of the rate pull limit, developers can quickly hit the quota limit leading to the e2e tests randomly failed.
There is two possible approaches to minimize/avoid that:
- if you have an account on Docker Hub you can specify and export your
credentials via environment variables
E2E_DOCKER_USERNAME
andE2E_DOCKER_PASSWORD
before running the test suite, however if you have a free account the quota limit is simply doubled and may not work for you - or you can run a local pull through cache registry and use
E2E_DOCKER_MIRROR
/E2E_DOCKER_MIRROR_INSECURE
environment variables
The most straightforward way to run it is to run in a terminal:
mkdir -p $HOME/.cache/registry
apptainer run --env REGISTRY_HTTP_ADDR=127.0.0.1:5001 \
--env REGISTRY_PROXY_REMOTEURL=https://registry-1.docker.io \
--bind $HOME/.cache/registry:/var/lib/registry \
docker://registry:2.7
And run the test suite in another terminal:
export E2E_DOCKER_MIRROR=127.0.0.1:5001
export E2E_DOCKER_MIRROR_INSECURE=true
make -C builddir e2e-test