Installation from Source
You can try the following two options:
Option 1: Download latest stable release
You can always download the latest tarball release from Github
For example, here is how to download version 2.2.1 and install:
VERSION=2.2.1
wget https://github.com/singularityware/singularity/releases/download/$VERSION/singularity-$VERSION.tar.gz
tar xvf singularity-$VERSION.tar.gz
cd singularity-$VERSION
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
Option 2: Download the latest development code
To download the most recent development code, you should use Git and do the following:
git clone https://github.com/singularityware/singularity.git
cd singularity
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
note: The ‘make install’ is required to be run as root to get a properly installed Singularity implementation. If you do not run it as root, you will only be able to launch Singularity as root due to permission limitations.
Updating
To update your Singularity version, you might want to first delete the executables for the old version:
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/libexec/singularity
And then install using one of the methods above.
Build an RPM from source
Like the above, you can build an RPM of Singularity so it can be more easily managed, upgraded and removed. From the base Singularity source directory do the following:
./autogen.sh
./configure
make dist
rpmbuild -ta singularity-*.tar.gz
sudo yum install ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/*/singularity-[0-9]*.rpm
Note: if you want to have the RPM install the files to an alternative location, you should define the environment variable ‘PREFIX’ to suit your needs, and use the following command to build:
PREFIX=/opt/singularity
rpmbuild -ta --define="_prefix $PREFIX" --define "_sysconfdir $PREFIX/etc" --define "_defaultdocdir $PREFIX/share" singularity-*.tar.gz
When using autogen.sh If you get an error that you have packages missing, for example on Ubuntu 16.04:
./autogen.sh
+libtoolize -c
./autogen.sh: 13: ./autogen.sh: libtoolize: not found
+aclocal
./autogen.sh: 14: ./autogen.sh: aclocal: not found
+autoheader
./autogen.sh: 15: ./autogen.sh: autoheader: not found
+autoconf
./autogen.sh: 16: ./autogen.sh: autoconf: not found
+automake -ca -Wno-portability
./autogen.sh: 17: ./autogen.sh: automake: not found
then you need to install dependencies:
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential libtool autotools-dev automake autoconf
Build a DEB from source
To build a deb package for Debian/Ubuntu/LinuxMint invoke the following commands:
$ fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b -us -uc # sudo will ask for a password to run the tests
$ sudo dpkg -i ../singularity-container_2.2.1-1_amd64.deb
Note that the tests will fail if singularity is not already installed on your system. This is the case when you run this procedure for the first time. In that case run the following sequence:
$ echo "echo SKIPPING TESTS THEYRE BROKEN" > ./test.sh
$ fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -nc -b -us -uc # this will continue the previous build without an initial 'make clean'