Multipass is a flexible, powerful tool that can be used for many purposes. In its simplest form, it can be used to quickly create and destroy Ubuntu VMs (instances) on any host machine. Used to a fuller extent, Multipass is a local mini-cloud on your laptop, allowing the testing and development of multi-instance or container-based cloud applications.
This tutorial will teach you how to create, customise and manage instances using Multipass. You will also learn how to apply Multipass in two common use cases.
Contents
- Install Multipass
- Create and use a basic instance
- Create a customised instance
- Manage instances
- Put your instances to use
- Next steps
Install Multipass
Multipass is available for Linux, macOs, or Windows. To install it on your OS of choice, please follow the instructions given here. This tutorial gives instructions for using Multipass on Windows.
Create and use a basic instance
From the application launcher, let’s start Multipass. Press the Windows key and type Multipass, then launch the application from there.
Once we’ve launched the application, we should see the Multipass tray icon in the lower right section of the screen (you may need to click on the small arrow located there):
Let’s click on the icon, then on “Open Shell”.
Clicking this button does many things in the background: it creates a new virtual machine (instance), named primary, with 1GB of RAM, 5GB of disk, and 1 CPU; installs the most recent Ubuntu LTS release on that instance; mounts our $HOME directory in the instance; and opens a shell to the instance, announced by the command prompt ubuntu@primary. You can see elements of this in the printout below.
Launched: primary
Mounted '/home/<user>' into 'primary:Home'
Welcome to Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.15.0-57-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
System information as of Thu Jan 26 08:06:22 PST 2023
System load: 0.0 Processes: 95
Usage of /: 30.2% of 4.67GB Users logged in: 0
Memory usage: 21% IPv4 address for ens3: 10.110.66.242
Swap usage: 0%
* Strictly confined Kubernetes makes edge and IoT secure. Learn how MicroK8s
just raised the bar for easy, resilient and secure K8s cluster deployment.
https://ubuntu.com/engage/secure-kubernetes-at-the-edge
0 updates can be applied immediately.
The list of available updates is more than a week old.
To check for new updates run: sudo apt update
ubuntu@primary:~$
Let’s test it out! As we just learned, the previous step automatically mounted our $HOME directory in the instance. Let’s try out a few linux commands to see what we’re working with:
ubuntu@primary:~$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 925804 203872 362484 916 359448 582120
Swap: 0 0 0
ubuntu@primary:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 92584 912 91672 1% /run
/dev/sda1 4893836 1477300 3400152 31% /
tmpfs 462900 0 462900 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5120 0 5120 0% /run/lock
/dev/sda15 106858 5329 101529 5% /boot/efi
tmpfs 92580 4 92576 1% /run/user/1000
:C:/Users/Scott 1048576000 0 1048576000 0% /home/ubuntu/Home
Congratulations, you’ve got your first instance!
This instance is great for when we just need a quick Ubuntu VM, but let’s say we want a more customised instance. Multipass has us covered there too!
Optional Exercises
Exercise 1:
When you clicked on Open Shell just now, what happened in the background was the equivalent of the CLI commands multipass launch –name primary followed by multipass shell. Open a terminal and try multipass shell (if you didn’t follow the steps above, you will have to run the launch command first).
Exercise 2:
In Multipass, an instance with the name primary is privileged. For example, it is the default argument of multipass shell. In two terminal instances, check multipass shell primary and multipass shell. Both commands should give the same result.
Create a customised instance
Multipass has a great feature to help us get started creating customised instances. Let’s open a terminal and run the command multipass find. This shows us a list of all of the images we can launch through Multipass currently.
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass find
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
snapcraft:devel 20230126 Snapcraft builder for the devel series
core core16 20200818 Ubuntu Core 16
core18 20211124 Ubuntu Core 18
core20 20230119 Ubuntu Core 20
core22 20230119 Ubuntu 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
daily:23.04 devel,lunar 20230125 Ubuntu 23.04
appliance:adguard-home 20200812 Ubuntu AdGuard Home Appliance
appliance:mosquitto 20200812 Ubuntu Mosquitto Appliance
appliance:nextcloud 20200812 Ubuntu Nextcloud Appliance
appliance:openhab 20200812 Ubuntu openHAB Home Appliance
appliance:plexmediaserver 20200812 Ubuntu Plex Media Server Appliance
anbox-cloud-appliance latest Anbox Cloud Appliance
charm-dev latest A development and testing environment for charmers
docker 0.4 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
Let’s launch an instance running Ubuntu 22.10 (“Kinetic Kudu”) by typing the command multipass launch kinetic
Now we have an instance running which has been named randomly by Multipass, in my case it is called decorous-skate.
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass launch kinetic
Launched: decorous-skate
We can check some basic info about our new instance by running the following:
multipass exec decorous-skate -- lsb_release -a
This tells Multipass to execute the command lsb_release -a on the “decorous-skate” instance.
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass exec decorous-skate -- lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 22.10
Release: 22.10
Codename: kinetic
Perhaps after using this instance for a while, we decide what we really need is the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, with a more informative name and a little more memory and disk. We can delete the natty-urial instance by running
multipass delete decorous-skate
Let’s now launch the type of instance we’re looking for by running this:
multipass launch lts --name ltsInstance --memory 2G --disk 10G --cpus 2
Manage instances
Now let’s confirm this new instance has the specs we’re looking for by running multipass info ltsInstance
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass info ltsInstance
Name: ltsInstance
State: Running
IPv4: 172.22.115.152
Release: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Image hash: 3100a27357a0 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)
CPU(s): 2
Load: 1.11 0.36 0.12
Disk usage: 1.4GiB out of 9.5GiB
Memory usage: 170.4MiB out of 1.9GiB
Mounts: --
We’ve created and deleted quite a few instances now. Let’s run Multipass list to see what instances we currently have.
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass list
Name State IPv4 Image
primary Running 10.110.66.242 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
decorous-skate Deleted -- Not Available
ltsInstance Running 172.22.115.152 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
We have two instances currently running, the primary instance and our LTS machine with customised specs. Our decorous-skate instance is still listed, but its state is “Deleted”. We can recover this instance by running multipass recover decorous-skate , but for right now let’s delete the instance permanently by running multipass purge. Running multipass list again confirms the instance is now permanently deleted:
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass list
Name State IPv4 Image
primary Running 10.110.66.242 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
ltsInstance Running 172.22.115.152 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
We’ve now seen a few ways to create, customise, and delete an instance. Now let’s put those instances to work!
Put your instances to use
Run a simple web server
Let’s go back to that customised LTS instance we created. Take note of its IP address revealed by multipass list in the previous step, then run multipass shell ltsInstance to open a shell in the instance.
From the shell, we can now run:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2
Now, let’s open a browser and type in the IP address of the instance into the address bar. We should now see the default Apache homepage.
Just like that, we’ve got a web server running in a Multipass instance!
We can use this web server locally for any kind of local development or testing we like. If however, we want to access this web server from the internet (e.g. from a different computer), we need an instance that is exposed to the external network.
Launch from a Blueprint to run Docker containers
Some environments require a lot of configuration and setup. Multipass Blueprints are instances with a deep level of customization. The Docker Blueprint, for example, is a pre-configured Docker environment with a Portainer container already running. We can launch an instance using the Docker Blueprint by running multipass launch docker --name docker-dev
Once that’s finished, let’s run multipass info docker-dev to note down the IP of the new instance.
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass launch docker --name docker-dev
Launched: docker-dev
C:\WINDOWS\system32> multipass info docker-dev
Name: docker-dev
State: Running
IPv4: 10.115.5.235
172.17.0.1
Release: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS
Image hash: 3100a27357a0 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)
CPU(s): 2
Load: 0.04 0.17 0.09
Disk usage: 2.5GiB out of 38.6GiB
Memory usage: 283.3MiB out of 3.8GiB
Mounts: --
Let’s take the first IP address shown and paste it into our browser, then add a colon and the portainer default port, 9000, like this: 10.115.5.235:9000. This will take us to the Portainer login page, where we can set a username and password.
From there, let’s select a local docker environment.
From there, we can click into the newly created “local” docker endpoint, navigate to the app templates page, and select NGINX
From the Portainer dashboard, we can see the ports that nginx has available. We can navigate to the IP address of our instance followed by that port number to see that we indeed have nginx running in a docker container inside Multipass!
Next steps
Congratulations! You now have the skills you need to use Multipass proficiently. There’s more to learn about Multipass and its capabilities - check out our how-to guides for ideas and for help with your project. Our reference page contains definitions of key concepts, a complete CLI command reference, settings options and more.
Let us know what you’re able to get done with Multipass!