[ESS] Emacs/ESS using Singularity container

[James W. MacDonald]

We are likely going to switch to an Apptainer-based compute cluster at work. Not being a fan of RStudio, I am looking for a way to stick with Emacs/ESS. Also, being a regular user, I don't have sudo access.

I can't imagine I'm the only one who wants to do this, but my Google-fu is failing me. It appears that running the Apptainer and connecting using TRAMP won't work, because I need sudo privileges to use --net when starting the Apptainer container to have a different IP/port to connect to. I found a post by Lionel Henry (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/ess-help/2017-April/011170.html) that looked promising, but pointing inferior-ess-program to a script that launches the Apptainer container doesn't seem to work. I've tried several versions of

apptainer  shell --cleanenv

and

apptainer exec --cleanenv R

Creating a Docker container with Emacs and ESS included works since I can start Emacs and run R as an inferior process, but then there's the issue of poking a hole in the container so I can get an X11 window that I can't get to work. I see an issue on the Rocker container GitHub that shows how to do that with a Docker container, but I'm pretty sure I need sudo privileges for that to work.

I am hoping someone has some pointers, or if I am off topic please point to the correct place for this question.

Thanks!

Jim