Testing Singularity builds

A quick post on testing Singularity builds, where I discovered how the %test section of the Singularity Definition File works. If you aren’t familiar, the Definition File is similar to the Dockerfile for Docker; it is used to define and build the image. From the documentation: A SingularityCE Definition File (or “def file” for short)…

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Running RStudio Server with Singularity

For running RStudio Server in a container, I’ve written about how to run RStudio Server with Docker; in the post I also listed out some reasons why you would want to do that instead of simply installing RStudio on your computer. This post demonstrates one way of running RStudio Server with Singularity. I learned that…

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Building Singularity images in layers

Recently I have been learning about Singularity and have been experimenting with building Singularity images. However it seems that there is no layering in Singularity, which exists with Docker and Dockerfiles. This is quite convenient to have because building will resume from the point where the last step failed. However the comment: You can build…

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Updating my Docker documentation

In my last post I outlined an approach for automatically creating reproducible documentation using GitHub Actions. I have now updated my Docker documentation using the same approach but without using a container because then I’d have to run Docker inside a Docker container (which is actually possible using GitLab’s CI/CD platform but I haven’t tried…

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Add Docker to your toolkit

Docker has been around for 8 years and it has become a very popular platform for developing software. In the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 39.2% of professional developers (total of 44,705) reported that they have done development work using Docker. Docker is only behind Linux and Windows! For the full list check out Stack…

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