Apptainer apt GPG Error Caused by Private /tmp

Category: 
Software
Resolution: 
Resolved
Affected Software: 
Apptainer (formerly Singularity)

Duplicate of:

https://www.osc.edu/resources/technical_support/known_issues/apptainer_c...

 

On any compute node, users may encounter the following error when installing packages with apt in Apptainer:

W: GPG error: http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security InRelease: Couldn't create temporary file /tmp/apt.conf.Dxk0I0 for passing config to apt-key
E: The repository 'http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security InRelease' is not signed.

This is a known issue related to the use of a private tmpdir, as reported at https://github.com/apptainer/apptainer/issues/895.

Workaround

To work around this issue, you may:

  • Build the Apptainer or Singularity image on a login node.
  • Replace /tmp with another writable local space, for example:
apptainer build -B /dev/shm:/tmp

      Note that using /dev/shm will consume part of your job memory.