Since April 2019 Azure Container Registry (ACR) supports storing of Singularity images. Today was the first time I actually had to use it and here I quickly discuss how.
Once I had installed Singularity, I pulled an example image from Singularity’s cloud library. To push this image to ACR, you obviously need to authenticate. For Docker you would normally use docker login or az acr login followed by docker push. This works differently for Singularity. One option is to use ORAS for log-in and uploading. See the Microsoft Docs for how to do this.
However, I wanted use the singularity command directly for pushing. For this you need to use a docker username and password for this. But where do you get this from in case of ACR? Turns out you need a Service Principal. Follow these instructions on how to create a new one or reuse an existing one. Make sure to use the acrpush permission (allowing push and pull) and modify ACR_NAME and SERVICE_PRINCIPAL_NAME as needed. Note that ACR_NAME is just the repository name and not the full login server URL.
Now you can push (or pull) using the --docker-username and --docker-password options:
singularity push --docker-username <spuser> --docker-password <sppass> image.sif oras://registry/namespace/image:tag
where spuser and sppass are the returned Service Principal username and password and registry is the repository login server.
And that’s it.