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sylabs
singularity
Go2018–2025
sylabs / singularity · Archived

singularity

SingularityCE is the Community Edition of Singularity, an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure.

Systems & InfrastructureSecurity & Privacy
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
998GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

SingularityCE is the Community Edition of Singularity, an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-12-23 15:30:52 UTC to 2025-06-26 10:18:54 UTC.

0122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
kinow·Jun 26, 2025
Apptainer and singularity ce are quite common in HPC. While both implementations fork the old singularity project, they are not really identical. We use singularity in the HPCs (like Leonardo, LUMI, Fugaku, NeSI NZ, Levante) but some devs and researchers have apptainer installed locally. We found a timezone bug a few days ago in our Python code (matplotlib,xarray,etc.), but that didn't happen with apptainer. As the code bases are still a bit similar, I could confirm apptainer fixed it but singularity ce was still affected by the bug -- singularity replaces the UTC timezone file by the user's timezone, Helsinki EEST in our case in LUMI HPC. https://github.com/sylabs/singularity/issues/3686
In Apptainer: Application Containers for Linux
theamk·Jun 23, 2022
rkt (and many other container solutions) was introduced after docker was released and became popular... they even mentioned docker's shortcomings as a motivation for the project creation [0]. It had all the same problems as other replacement software: there were plenty of bugs and missing features (the announcement mentions "prototype quality release"), documentation was limited, and there are no community to help you. None of those would be fatal if it was significantly better than docker, but it was not -- it had less functionality and needed more scaffolding. So almost no one made the switch. It is closed now [1] And why "rkt"? There were much better alternative container runtimes. For example Sylabs Singularity [2] -- container-as-a-file, instant mounting, etc... I wish more people knew about it. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20141
Read the rest
201181834/https://coreos.co... [1] https://github.com/rkt/rkt#warning-end-of-project-warning [2] https://github.com/sylabs/singularity#singularityce
In Permissive forwarding rule leads to unintentional exposure of containers (2021)
mroche·Dec 23, 2018
> Well judging by the original GitHub issue about unprivileged runc containers, the largest group of commenters is from the scientific community who are restricted to not run certain programs as root. Which is why we use Singularity[0]. Apologies if I’m missing something, but to me this problem they’re trying to solve, has already been solved. As stated in the README: > Singularity is an open source container platform designed to be simple, fast, and secure. Singularity is optimized for EPC and HPC workloads, allowing untrusted users to run untrusted containers in a trusted way. Singularity ‘requires’ root or elevated privileges to create and modify containers, but running them is done in the user’s namespace with that user’s permission set. And privileges can’t be elevated during the containers runtime as there are kernel level catches t
Read the rest
hat prevent sudo and su from working inside the container. In terms of the ‘static’ part, Singularity uses SquashFS to produce a single binary image, and uses the SIF (Singularity Image File) format to define applications, their dependencies, and runscripts. On top of being able to run anything inside the container with the `exec` subcommand. You can also create sandbox development images that are just a directory on disk for testing things out and installing/building tools manually, then convert it into a SIF container after for cluster deployment. Or be nicer and port your process into a recipe/definition file. Most scientific/HPC related centers have started utilizing Singularity for their container workflow. Tools like Docker are essentially banned because of their perma-root privileges[1]. [0] https://github.com/sylabs/singularity [1] I’m an admin who reimplemented Singularity on our university’s cluster. With a heavy need on filesystem integration (which Singularity solves with great configuration options), containers which run with root privileges would be a massive security vulnerability.
In Binctr: Static, unprivileged, self-contained containers as executable binaries

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