Where can you use Apptainer? Apptainer only runs on the Linux operating system, which sounds limiting, but in practice it is not that restrictive. All of the high performance computing clusters, such as TACC's Frontera and Vista, are running Linux. And on an instance on Amazon Web Services or the Google Cloud Platform, you could choose to run a Linux instance there. You can run containers easily in those environments. You can also run them on a Mac or a Windows computer if you start up a virtual Linux computer on that Windows or Mac computer.

Checking If Apptainer Is Installed

If you are on a system, say a high performance computing system running Linux, and you want to know if Apptainer is installed, you can issue the command which apptainer, which will tell you where in the file system Apptainer is installed. You can also run apptainer --version to find out what version of Apptainer is installed. Finally, it is a good idea to check if the system provides an environment module for Apptainer or Singularity by running module spider apptainer, e.g., or by following specific instructions in the user documentation.