This tutorial aims to install Singularity 4.0.2 on your Windows machine and is in most parts a direct extract from the INSTALL.md of that release. This tutorial may be out of date, so check the INSTALL.md if you are using a different release.

In a Windows PowerShell, run following command as an administrator. You can get an administrator PowerShell by clicking the Windows icon, searching for „PowerShell“, and right-clicking the application and selecting „Run as administrator“.

wsl --install

WSL will then be available from your Start menu.

The first thing to do is to update your Linux distribution (the default WSL distribution is Ubuntu, if you change it this command may be different):

sudo bash -c 'apt update && apt upgrade -y'
sudo apt install -y \
    autoconf \
    automake \
    cryptsetup \
    git \
    libfuse-dev \
    libglib2.0-dev \
    libseccomp-dev \
    libtool \
    pkg-config \
    runc \
    squashfs-tools \
    squashfs-tools-ng \
    uidmap \
    wget \
    zlib1g-dev

Then install go. If you have go installed previously, be sure to remove /usr/local/go first.

export VERSION=1.21.4 OS=linux ARCH=amd64
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/go
wget -O /tmp/go${VERSION}.${OS}-${ARCH}.tar.gz https://dl.google.com/go/go${VERSION}.${OS}-${ARCH}.tar.gz
sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf /tmp/go${VERSION}.${OS}-${ARCH}.tar.gz
# make go available for usage:
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

All Singularity releases can be found here: https://github.com/sylabs/singularity/releases

We will continue with 4.0.2, so we will fetch and compile the code. After successful compilation it will be installed on your system:

wget -O /tmp/singularity-ce-4.0.2.tar.gz https://github.com/sylabs/singularity/releases/download/v4.0.2/singularity-ce-4.0.2.tar.gz
tar -C /tmp -xvf /tmp/singularity-ce-4.0.2.tar.gz
cd /tmp/singularity-ce-4.0.2
make -C builddir && sudo make -C builddir install

Your Singularity installation can now be tested via

singularity --version

If everything went well, the output should be

singularity-ce version 4.0.2