Admin Quick Start
This quick start gives an overview of installation of Apptainer, a description of the architecture of Apptainer, and pointers to configuration files. More information, including alternate installation options and detailed configuration options can be found later in this guide.
Architecture of Apptainer
Apptainer is designed to allow containers to be executed as if they were native programs or scripts on a host system. No daemon is required to build or run containers, and the security model is compatible with shared systems.
As a result, integration with clusters and schedulers such as Univa Grid Engine, Torque, SLURM, SGE, and many others is as simple as running any other command. All standard input, output, errors, pipes, IPC, and other communication pathways used by locally running programs are synchronized with the applications running locally within the container.
Apptainer favors an ‘integration over isolation’ approach to
containers. By default only the mount and user namespaces are isolated for
containers, so that they have their own filesystem view. Access to
hardware such as GPUs, high speed networks, and shared filesystems is
easy and does not require special configuration. Default access to
user home directories, /tmp
space, and installation specific
mounts makes it simple for users to benefit from the reproducibility
of containerized applications without major changes to their existing
workflows. Where more complete isolation is important, Apptainer
can use additional Linux namespaces and other security and resource
limits to accomplish this.
Apptainer Security
See the Security section of the user guide.
Installation
Apptainer can be installed from source directly, by building an RPM or Debian package from the source, or by downloading pre-built packages. Linux distributions may also package Apptainer, but their packages may or may not be up-to-date with the upstream version on GitHub.
To install from source, follow the instructions in INSTALL.md on GitHub. Other methods are discussed in the Installation section of this guide.
Configuration
Apptainer is configured using files under etc/apptainer
in
your --prefix
, or --syconfdir
if you used that option with
mconfig
. In a default installation from source without a
--prefix
set you will find them under
/usr/local/etc/apptainer
. In a default installation from RPM or Deb packages you will find them under /etc/apptainer
.
You can edit these files directly, or using the Apptainer config
global
command as the root user to manage them.
apptainer.conf
contains the majority of options controlling the
runtime behavior of Apptainer. Additional files control security,
network, and resource configuration. Head over to the
Configuration files section where the
files and configuration options are discussed.
Testing
You can run a quick test of Apptainer using a small alpine container:
$ apptainer exec docker://alpine cat /etc/alpine-release
3.9.2
See the user guide for more information about how to use Apptainer.