Apptainer cache location

I was trying to figure out where [Apptainer][apptainer] caches images in its SIF format created on the fly from OCI images pulled from a remote registry.

The location appears to be under ~/.apptainer/cache/oci-tmp/, as can be seen if you explicitly convert a Docker image to a SIF file at a known path (here ~/somefile.sif) then search for another file with the same checksum under ~/.apptainer:

[someuser@node001 [stanage] ~]$ apptainer run docker://alpine:latest whoami
INFO:    Using cached SIF image
someuser
[someuser@node001 [stanage] ~]$ apptainer pull somefile.sif docker://alpine:latest 
INFO:    Using cached SIF image
[someuser@node001 [stanage] ~]$ sha256sum somefile.sif 
09e9acc1061b6683b72d274c41950b99c228040492925c8acb01813e633bde07  somefile.sif
[someuser@node001 [stanage] ~]$ find .apptainer -type f -exec sha256sum '{}' \; | grep 09e9acc1061b6683b72d274c41950b99c228040492925c8acb01813e633bde07
09e9acc1061b6683b72d274c41950b99c228040492925c8acb01813e633bde07  .apptainer/cache/oci-tmp/02bb6f428431fbc2809c5d1b41eab5a68350194fb508869a33cb1af4444c9b11

Annoying that apptainer cache list -v doesn’t tell you more about the location of the cache!