Installing apps into containers

[Nidhal Ghanmi]

Hello

I am willing on how to in order to install additional apps into a created or pulled container ?

I tryed with some options like

$ singularity --sandbox --update sandbox/ file.def

or

$ singularity shell --writable sandbox/

Everything will always look fine , and everything installed but later new tool or tools will never appear

$ singularity exec sandbox/ which tool-name

gives nothing

Please any proper way to do this ?

Thanks

Nidhal

[Dave Dykstra]

Nidhal,

The --writable option does not allow saving changes in the container,
similar to a normal docker container. The best option is to build a
fresh container based on another one using the image build tools.
Otherwise I believe I did see a way to save changes once but I have
never used it and so don't know the details.

Dave

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[David Godlove]

You can save changes to a sandbox.  Use the --sandbox option with the build command.  This creates a plain old chroot directory for you instead of a sif.  These containers are rw if you use the --writable option with them and changes will persist.  But they are only appropriate for development.  Use a sif for production.  If you need changes to persist in your sif, use a directory or an ext3 image as writable overlay.  See this:

https://sylabs.io/guides/latest/user-guide/persistent_overlays.html?highlight=overlay

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/lbl.gov/d/msgid/singularity/Ya988o6z2YUslyaX%40fnal.gov.