BioContainers is a community-driven project that builds, hosts, and maintains container images for scientific software. We maintain more than 100,000 containers for over 12,000 tools. Our goal is to make software easy to discover, install, and run reproducible across laptops, clusters, clouds, and workflow systems.
Important
Despite our name, BioContainers is not only for biology or bioinformatics. Researchers and developers from every scientific discipline are welcome. Naming is hard, we chose ours early, and changing it now would be even harder. :)
The main entry point for BioContainers Docker/OCI images is the BioContainers organization on Quay.io. We maintain mirrors of all containers for resilience and availability, but Quay.io is the canonical place to start.
The Galaxy Project also converts and distributes BioContainers images in the Singularity/Apptainer format. Individual images can be found on the Galaxy Singularity Depot.
Important
If you use Singularity/Apptainer images heavily, for example, on a cluster or in a production service, please do not download them repeatedly from the Depot. Use Galaxy's singularity.galaxyproject.org CVMFS repository instead. It provides scalable, distributed, cached access to the complete container collection.
For most scientific software, we recommend creating a package in Bioconda or conda-forge rather than writing and maintaining a container recipe directly. Once a package is available, BioContainers automatically builds the corresponding container, you get the container for free.
Need several Conda packages in one image? Request a multi-package container in the multi-package-containers repository or use the graphical multi-package container assistant.
BioContainers is open, community-driven, and built for reproducible science, whatever your field may be.
