Getting Started With Multipass on MacOS

Tom Dean - 1/23/23

Introduction

Wouldn't it be nice if you could have your own personal mini-cloud running in the confines of your Mac? Now you can, thanks to Multipass!

Per Canonical:

"Multipass is a tool to generate cloud-style Ubuntu VMs quickly on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It gives you a simple but powerful CLI that allows you to quickly access an Ubuntu command line or create your own local mini-cloud."

From the Multipass GitHub repository:

"Multipass is a lightweight VM manager for Linux, Windows and macOS. It's designed for developers who want a fresh Ubuntu environment with a single command. It uses KVM on Linux, Hyper-V on Windows and HyperKit on macOS to run the VM with minimal overhead. It can also use VirtualBox on Windows and macOS. Multipass will fetch images for you and keep them up to date.

Since it supports metadata for cloud-init, you can simulate a small cloud deployment on your laptop or workstation."

Multipass makes running Ubuntu virtual machines fast and easy.

Let's see how we set it up!

References

GitHub: Getting Started With Multipass on MacOS

Multipass

Multipass Documentation

Install Multipass

How to install Multipass on macOS

Using cloud-init with Multipass

Multipass Tutorial: MacOS

Multipass: GitHub Repository

Homebrew

Prerequisites

Per Canonical:

"The default backend on macOS is hyperkit on Intel, and qemu on the M1, wrapping Apple’s Hypervisor.framework. You can use any M1 Mac, or a 2010 or newer Intel Mac with macOS 10.14 Mojave or later installed."

Most of the required software will be installed using Homebrew. If you don't already have Homebrew installed, you can install it using:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

More information on Homebrew is available via the link in the References section above.

Install Multipass Using Homebrew

Installation is straightforward, using Homebrew:

brew install --cask multipass

Uninstall Multipass: OPTIONAL

If you'd like to uninstall Multipass, you can use:

brew uninstall multipass

To clean up Multipass data and uninstall:

brew uninstall --zap multipass

Quick Test: Multipass

Let's validate our Multipass installation by checking the version:

multipass version

We should get a result similar to:

multipass   1.11.0+mac
multipassd  1.11.0+mac

Remember, versions and architectures can vary based on when you install and what you install it on!

Now that Multipass is installed, let's try it out!

Working With Multipass

Deploy Your First Instance

Before we get started, let's take a look at the online help available with Multipass:

multipass help

Usage: multipass [options] <command>
Create, control and connect to Ubuntu instances.

This is a command line utility for multipass, a
service that manages Ubuntu instances.

Options:
  -h, --help     Displays help on commandline options
  -v, --verbose  Increase logging verbosity. Repeat the 'v' in the short option
                 for more detail. Maximum verbosity is obtained with 4 (or more)
                 v's, i.e. -vvvv.

Available commands:
  alias         Create an alias
  aliases       List available aliases
  authenticate  Authenticate client
  delete        Delete instances
  exec          Run a command on an instance
  find          Display available images to create instances from
  get           Get a configuration setting
  help          Display help about a command
  info          Display information about instances
  launch        Create and start an Ubuntu instance
  list          List all available instances
  mount         Mount a local directory in the instance
  networks      List available network interfaces
  purge         Purge all deleted instances permanently
  recover       Recover deleted instances
  restart       Restart instances
  set           Set a configuration setting
  shell         Open a shell on a running instance
  start         Start instances
  stop          Stop running instances
  suspend       Suspend running instances
  transfer      Transfer files between the host and instances
  umount        Unmount a directory from an instance
  unalias       Remove aliases
  version       Show version details

Let's try deploying an instance. We can use the multipass find command to retrieve a list of available images:

multipass find

This should give us output similar to the following:

Image                       Aliases           Version          Description
snapcraft:core18            18.04             20201111         Snapcraft builder for Core 18
snapcraft:core20            20.04             20210921         Snapcraft builder for Core 20
snapcraft:core22            22.04             20220426         Snapcraft builder for Core 22
18.04                       bionic            20230112         Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
20.04                       focal             20230117         Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
22.04                       jammy,lts         20230107         Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
22.10                       kinetic           20230112         Ubuntu 22.10
anbox-cloud-appliance                         latest           Anbox Cloud Appliance
charm-dev                                     latest           A development and testing environment for charmers
docker                                        latest           A Docker environment with Portainer and related tools
jellyfin                                      latest           Jellyfin is a Free Software Media System that puts you in control of managing and streaming your media.
minikube                                      latest           minikube is local Kubernetes

We'll launch the lts image, which, along with jammy, is aliased to the 22.04 image. We can use any of those to launch the image.

Using the multipass launch command:

multipass launch lts

Once the instance is up, we'll get a Launched: message, along with our random instance name:

Launched: unanimous-harrier

We can see a list of instances using the multipass list command:

multipass list

We should see something like this:

Name                    State             IPv4             Image
unanimous-harrier       Running           192.168.64.2     Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

If we want to get detailed information about our instance, we can use the multipass info command:

multipass info unanimous-harrier

We should see output similar to this:

Name:           unanimous-harrier
State:          Running
IPv4:           192.168.64.2
Release:        Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Image hash:     3100a27357a0 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)
CPU(s):         1
Load:           0.08 0.07 0.06
Disk usage:     1.4GiB out of 4.7GiB
Memory usage:   164.8MiB out of 969.6MiB
Mounts:         --

This gives us a quick summary of our unanimous-harrier instance's vital statistics.

Deploying an instance was fast and easy! Now, how do we interact with this instance?

Interacting With Our Multipass Instance

Now that we have an instance up and running, let's take a look at a couple of ways to interact with it.

One way to interact with our instance is to open a shell in our instance using the multipass shell command:

multipass shell unanimous-harrier

Let's take a look at the contents of the /etc/os-release file to get some information on our instance:

ubuntu@unanimous-harrier:~$ cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION_ID="22.04"
VERSION="22.04.1 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)"
VERSION_CODENAME=jammy
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy"
UBUNTU_CODENAME=jammy

So, we can interact with our instance using a shell, just like any other Linux machine.

We might want to execute a command without opening a shell. We can do this with the multipass exec command:

multipass exec unanimous-harrier -- cat /etc/os-release

We see the same information as when we executed the command in a shell, without the interactive shell session:

PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS"
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION_ID="22.04"
VERSION="22.04.1 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)"
VERSION_CODENAME=jammy
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy"
UBUNTU_CODENAME=jammy

Cleaning Up

The beauty of having our own little private cloud is that we can easily get rid of resources that we're finished with.

Let's take a look at our instances:

multipass list

We see our unanimous-harrier instance:

Name                    State             IPv4             Image
unanimous-harrier       Running           192.168.64.2     Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

First, let's stop our instance:

multipass stop unanimous-harrier

Now that our unanimous-harrier instance is stopped, let's take a look:

multipass list

We can see that our instance is stopped:

Name                    State             IPv4             Image
unanimous-harrier       Stopped           --               Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

We'll delete our unanimous-harrier instance:

multipass delete unanimous-harrier

Checking our work:

multipass list

We can confirm our unanimous-harrier instance has been deleted:

Name                    State             IPv4             Image
unanimous-harrier       Deleted           --               Not Available

If you want to completely remove the unanimous-harrier instance, you can use the multipass purge command:

multipass purge

Checking our work:

multipass list

We see no instances:

No instances found.

That was easy! Good stuff!

Digging Deeper

If you'd like to dig a little deeper into running instances using Multipass, here are some good resources: