Coffee and Bytes: Containers for Reproducible Science: a practical intro to Docker and Apptainer

Friday 22 May 2026, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Berlin

CSBD Ground floor

Anthony Vega (MPI-CBG, Scientific Computing Facility)

We are back this month with a new discussion topic very relevant to coding, Containers presented by Fabian Rost. If you've ever broken an analysis by updating a package or struggled to run someone else's code because of missing dependencies, containers might be the solution you're looking for. A container bundles everything your analysis needs — from the operating system down to the last library — into a single, portable, and reproducible unit.

 

In this session, Fabian will introduce the two most common container engines: Docker for local use, and Apptainer/Singularity for HPC environments like our cluster. He will show where to find prebuilt containers online, how to run them on your own machine and on the cluster, and how we build our own containers for scRNA-seq analysis in the lab. Finally, he will cover how to share containers alongside your publications to make your science truly reproducible.