Apptainer is an open source container platform designed to run complex applications on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way.

Welcome to the Apptainer User Guide! This guide aims to give an introduction to Apptainer, brief installation instructions, and cover topics relevant to users building and running containers.

Apptainer can be installed on any modern Linux distribution, on bare-metal or inside a Virtual Machine. It can even often be run nested inside another Apptainer container or inside some other container system.

This guide is intended for running Apptainer on a computer where you will install Apptainer yourself. If you need to request an installation on your shared resource, see requesting an installation for …

Apptainer is an open source container platform designed to run complex applications on high-performance computing (HPC) clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way.

Apptainer was created to run complex applications on HPC clusters in a simple, portable, and reproducible way. First developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, it quickly became …

Apptainer definition files are the most powerful type of target when building a container. For detailed information on writing Apptainer definition files, please see the Container Definitions documentation.

This section will highlight these workflows, and discuss the limitations and best practices to keep in mind when creating containers targeting both Docker and Apptainer. {Apptainer} can also run nested …

The build spec target is a definition (def) file, local image, or URI that can be used to create an Apptainer container. Several different local target formats exist:

Apptainer supports installing apps within internal modules based on the concept of the Scientific Filesystem (SCIF). More information on defining and using SCIF Apps can be found here.