Enhancement: Running act on HPC/without admin rights

[ma7dev]

Describe feature

I am developing on an HPC server where I don't have admin rights to install go and docker. Although I might be able to ask the sysadmin to install go, we can't install docker on the HPC server due to security reasons. However, the HPC server has a replacement for docker, which is singularity.

I was wondering whether is enable act to work with singularity as it will enable researchers and engineers who are developing on HPC servers to run GitHub Actions on the HPC server.

If there is a replacement to act that does this, please let me know as I have been doing a lot of research and couldn't find something as powerful as act or even something that does the running of GitHub Actions on HPC servers.

[catthehacker]

you can specify socket with DOCKER_HOST environment variable and point it to singularity socket

[KevinSayers]

I just was pointed to Act and I am interested in the exact same application (so great timing!) of testing on an HPC system. Perhaps I am missing something but does the Singularity socket solution mentioned by @catthehacker require Singularity-CRI to be installed first?

[Linux-cpp-lisp]

Can someone elaborate on how one would set up DOCKER_HOST with singularity? I am also on an academic cluster that will not support docker for security reasons but has singularity (https://docs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/kb/singularity-on-the-cluster/) and would like to be able to run CI workflows on that hardware.

[magland]

I would also love to use act with singularity, but I don't understand the solution from @catthehacker . Could someone elaborate a bit on how this would be done?

[ChristopherHX]

I have absolutly no idea if "singularity socket" even exists, at least I cannot find any references for a docker compatible singularity daemon.
As long you don't need containers, you can test this change #1293. It allows you to manually start a container and execute act inside of it, without act trying to create child containers ( requires a cli flag mentioned in the PR ).