The default backend on macOS is qemu, wrapping Apple’s Hypervisor.framework. You can use any Mac (M1, M2, or Intel based) with macOS 10.15 Catalina or later installed.
To install Multipass on macOS, you have two options: the installer package or brew. Upgrading and uninstallation options depend on this choice as well.
Activate the downloaded installer and it will guide you through the necessary steps. You will need an account with administrator privileges to complete the installation.
To uninstall, run the script:
$ sudo sh "/Library/Application Support/com.canonical.multipass/uninstall.sh"
If you don’t have it already, install Brew. Then, to install Multipass simply execute:
$ brew install multipass
To uninstall while keeping your VMs and data, you can use:
$ brew uninstall multipass
Caveats:
Although Brew supports the --zap option to remove all data, it does not allow Multipass to remove all the VMs and data properly. The Multipass daemon needs to be alive and running to unregister VMs from certain backends (e.g. VirtualBox). However, Brew executes the zap procedure strictly after the uninstall step. By then, the Multipass daemon is no longer available.
This issue report has more information. The workaround is to remove VMs manually before uninstalling:
multipass delete --purge --all
brew uninstall --zap multipass # to destroy all other data, too
You’ve installed Multipass. Time to run your first commands! Use multipass version to check your version or multipass launch to create your first instance.
By the way, you’ve left off the “cask” part of the uninstall commands, so they don’t work, and give an “Error: Unknown command: zap” message, which isn’t very helpful. It’s brew cask uninstall multipass and brew cask zap multipass. Otherwise, thanks for the info!
TLDR;
Homebrew sends GA events. Which can be disabled but the user needs to know-how. I would suggest adding a small comment with a link to docs to disable analytics.
Hi @apagiaro, we’re keeping some macOS and Windows parts closed-source for now, so no, we don’t currently provide a way to build or install from source on those platforms.
After installing with brew and adding my user to the admin group, I still need a sudo to use multipass, otherwise
$ multipass shell charm-dev-29
shell failed: The client is not authenticated with the Multipass service.
Please use 'multipass authenticate' before proceeding.
And authenticate doesn’t seem to work: the passphrase gets rejected:
$ sudo multipass authenticate
Password:
Please enter passphrase:
authenticate failed: Passphrase is not set. Please `multipass set local.passphrase` with a trusted client.
Hey @sed-i, have a look at at these docs on security and how to authenticate. The daemon will only deal with clients/users that it trusts. On Linux, that’s a) the first user belonging to the sudo group (+ root) who connects (presumably the one who installed the application) and b) clients that were able to authenticate with multipass authenticate thereafter.
So, when an administrator who installs multipass wants to allow others, he or she needs to set a password and share it with allowed users, who then need to multipass authenticate with it. You probably connected as root the first time, so only root is trusted by multipassd.
