News

Singularity Hub is going read-only

As of early 2021, the creator and maintainer for 5 years of Singularity Hub @vsoch left Stanford for a new opportunity, and she and the community have been working to figure out a future for the registry as she can no longer maintain it. Due to the shortage of time and because alternative builder services are available, Singularity Hub will soon be going “read-only” to support a migration to a read only registry. For the purpose of reproducibility, namely ensuring that all containers that have been built and are currently in the registry will continue to exist at their respective shub:// urls, we have a plan to do a migration, the timeline and details which are discussed in this post.

Timeline

In a week, on Saturday April 17th 2021, Singularity Hub will stop reacting to the changes in your Singularity files, and will not build any new images. The site will otherwise remain operational for another week.

In two weeks, on Saturday April 24th 2021, Singularity Hub website will be turned down and will redirect to an archival location hosting images that were existing before the freeze. By default, all images will be included, however if you would like to opt one or more of your collections out of being included, please let us know.

Existing images

To support the efforts of reproducible science and ease migration to alternative solutions, the current plan is to move already existing images to be served from the https://datasets.datalad.org/, thanks to the infrastructure and bandwidth provided by the Center for Open Neuroscience @ Psychology and Brain Sciences of Dartmouth College.

And no worries, DataLad will not be required, and singularity pull shub:// will be working as before, so no changes would be required to your scripts for already existing images. singularity-hub.org will continue to exist as a static, archival registry.

Alternatives

While it could be possible to again provide builders for Singularity Hub, there are no plans to do this at this time. The following options are available if you want to continue building:

• Deploy your own Singularity Registry Server (sregistry)
• Build a Docker image and pull down to Singularity with the docker:// unique resource identifier. You kill two birds with one stone.
• Build and upload Singularity images to GitHub releases: see https://github.com/singularityhub/singularity-deploy
• Use datalad-container to manage your built images, and host them across a wide range of storage solutions supported by DataLad or git-annex: see the datalad handbook for details.
• A small free tier is available on the Sylabs Cloud

Singularity Hub Open for Building

Singularity Hub is open for general building! We have a few other updates to announce for the server.

GitHub Login

You now shouldn’t log out when you change between www and a naked domain (e.g., singularity-hub.org vs. www.singularity-hub.org), and the server will redirect to https://singularity-hub.org.

Webhooks

Importantly, since we now use a naked URL, all previously existing webhooks for your repositories will need to be checked and updated if necessary to not include www. You can go into your GitHub repository Settings –> Webhooks, and then select the Singularity Hub webhook and change the url to not use www., and click save.

Singularity Hub Announcement

I’m happy to announce that we will cautiously be opening up Singularity Hub after quite an eventful July. This version of Singularity Hub follows a malicious use of our API that indeed did put the future of the service at risk. I say cautiously because we have disabled building for all except for a group of testing users, and will plan on re-enabling building for everyone later this week, or sometime next week. If you are interested in being a testing user, please let me know. Through the end of this week I’m going to be monitoring the service like a hawk, and all users should expect intermittent restarts if necessary.

Quick Links

For quick links, see the new limits and release notes.

Singularity Hub 2.2 Release

Singularity Hub v2.2 is a security release following a malicious use of the API. A quick summary of changes include:

• limits have been set on all views, APIs, and user actions
• login is required for most views
• unnecessary views have been removed

A detailed description is included below, and for a listing of new limits we direct the reader to the limits page. See best best practices for instructions on how to properly pull containers so that you don’t exceed a rate limit.

Singularity Hub 2.1 Release

The release of Singularity Hub v2.1 coincides with Singularity v2.5 release, and Singularity Python v2.5. Importantly, we have done the following:

• you will need to update your builders for old collections, under “Settings” in your collection view.
• the builder is updated to give you a larger instance by default (100MB) and more cores (2), the n1-standard-2 instance up from n1-standard-1
• the interface “snack box” and plots in the container view have been removed.