Multipass now available for macOS

Hi everyone!

Multipass for macOS

We’re proud to announce that Multipass, the quickest route to a mint-fresh Ubuntu VM is now available for macOS as a beta release.

Our latest release, 2018.6.1, includes an installer for macOS 10.10.3 and later on 2010 or newer Macs.

Installation

After downloading the zip, double-click to unpack it and then double-click the resulting .pkg file. That will guide you through the installation.

You may want to install bash-completion from brew or MacPorts first to aid you in the terminal.

Usage

Run Terminal and execute:

multipass launch --name ubuntu-vm

You will then see multipass downloading the image (only once, or when there’s a fresh one) and preparing the instance for you. You can omit the --name flag and it will choose a name for you.

multipass shell ubuntu-vm

will then connect to the instance - you’re in a full Ubuntu environment now.

multipass help

shows an overview of the available commands, and

multipass help launch

will display a guide on how to use the launch command. Help is available for all the other commands as well, of course.

Feedback

We would love to hear your feedback, the open-source code is hosted on GitHub and that’s where you can report issues as well, or you can just reply below.

Thanks!

6 Likes

Thanks for sharing … multipass has been very useful for me on the mac!

WHAAAAAT??? Nice Steve Jobs “And one more thing!”

Can you tell us about it? I see it’s using hyperkit.

Indeed, we wanted to use the native hypervisor capabilities of macOS so we based off of hyperkit. Other than the VM driver, it’s all the same code that Multipass on Linux uses. :slight_smile:

It will download the freshest image from http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/, configure and launch it for you. It will then keep track of the image changes so the next time you want a new instance, the image is already there for you.

You can use cloud-init to preconfigure the instance to your liking (see multipass help launch).

What else would you like to know? :wink:

On OSX how do we use the launcher at the top of the screen to launch a different program than the horrible built-in “Terminal” application when we select “Open Shell”?

Hi @md500-pilot we’re discussing this problem in this GitHub issue.

Hi, wondering if its currently possible to grab a host USB port from a multipass vm in MacOS?

Hi @smellydog11, it could be done with the VirtualBox driver and running VBoxManage or VirtualBox itself under sudo.

By that I mean that you can multipass launch ... an instance, and then use VirtualBox directly to add a USB device to it.

I’ve changed the driver to virtualbox, created a vm, and fired up the virtualbox.app - the vm doesn’t show up there (should it?)

I’ll play with with vboxmanage and let you know what happens. Thanks!

I got it to display in the app - sudo open doesn’t work
sudo /Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/MacOS/VirtualBox does work.
Thx!