Because looper uses divvy for computing configuration, running jobs in containers is easy! Divvy can use the same template system to do either cluster computing or to run jobs in linux containers (for example, using docker or singularity). You can even run jobs in a container on a cluster.
All you need to do is follow the same instructions as in running jobs on a cluster, but use templates that run those jobs in containers. To see examples of how to do this, refer to the divvy docs on running containers.
Here is a quick guide to get you started using containers with looper:
This could be a docker image (hosted on dockerhub), which you would download via docker pull, or it could be a singularity image you have saved in a local folder. This is pipeline-specific, and you'll need to download the image recommended by the authors of the pipeline or pipelines you want to run.
pipeline_interfaceThe pipeline_interface.yaml file will need a compute section for each pipeline that can be run in a container, specifying the image. For example:
compute:
singularity_image: ${SIMAGES}myimage
docker_image: databio/myimage
For singularity images, you just need to make sure that the images indicated in the pipeline_interface are available in those locations on your system. For docker, make sure you have the docker images pulled.
DIVCFG.Divvy will need templates that work with the container. This just needs to be set up once for your compute environment, which would enable you to run any pipeline in a container (as long as you have an image). You should set up the DIVCFG compute environment configuration by following instructions in the DIVCFG readme. If it's not already container-aware, you will just need to add a new container-aware "compute package" to your DIVCFG file. Here's an example of how to add one for using singularity in a SLURM environment:
singularity_slurm:
submission_template: templates/slurm_singularity_template.sub
submission_command: sbatch
singularity_args: -B /sfs/lustre:/sfs/lustre,/nm/t1:/nm/t1
In singularity_args you'll need to pass any mounts or other settings to be passed to singularity. The actual slurm_singularity_template.sub file looks something like this:
#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name='{JOBNAME}'
#SBATCH --output='{LOGFILE}'
#SBATCH --mem='{MEM}'
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task='{CORES}'
#SBATCH --time='{TIME}'
#SBATCH --partition='{PARTITION}'
#SBATCH -m block
#SBATCH --ntasks=1
echo 'Compute node:' `hostname`
echo 'Start time:' `date +'%Y-%m-%d %T'`
singularity instance.start {SINGULARITY_ARGS} {SINGULARITY_IMAGE} {JOBNAME}_image
srun singularity exec instance://{JOBNAME}_image {CODE}
singularity instance.stop {JOBNAME}_image
Notice how these values will be used to populate a template that will run the pipeline in a container. Now, to use singularity, you just need to activate this compute package in the usual way, which is using the compute argument: looper run --compute singularity_slurm.