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What is Multipass?

Multipass is a lightweight VM manager for Linux, Windows and macOS. It's designed for developers who want to spin up a fresh Ubuntu environment with a single command. It uses KVM on Linux, Hyper-V on Windows and QEMU on macOS to run virtual machines with minimal overhead. It can also use VirtualBox on Windows and macOS. Multipass will fetch Ubuntu 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.

Project status

Service Status
CI Build Status
Snap Build Status
Codecov Codecov Status

Installation

  • On Linux, Multipass is available as a snap:

    sudo snap install multipass
    
  • On macOS, download the installer from GitHub.

    Alternatively, you can use Homebrew. Please note that this method is not officially supported, as it is not maintained by the Multipass team, but by the community. Multipass is available as a cask:

    brew install --cask multipass
    

    Please note that you may be required to enter your password for some sudo operations during installation. You may also need to disable the firewall to launch a multipass instance successfully on macOS.

  • On Windows, download the installer from GitHub.

For more information, see How to install Multipass.

Usage

Here are some pointers to get started with Multipass. For a more comprehensive learning experience, please check out the Multipass Tutorial.

Find available images

$ multipass find

Image                       Aliases           Version          Description
20.04                       focal             20240731         Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
22.04                       jammy             20240808         Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
24.04                       noble,lts         20240806         Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Blueprint                   Aliases           Version          Description
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
ros-noetic                                    0.1              A development and testing environment for ROS Noetic.
ros2-humble                                   0.1              A development and testing environment for ROS 2 Humble.

Launch a fresh instance of the current Ubuntu LTS

$ multipass launch lts

Launched: dancing-chipmunk

Check out the running instances

$ multipass list

Name                    State             IPv4             Image
dancing-chipmunk        Running           192.168.64.8     Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
phlegmatic-bluebird     Stopped           --               Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
docker                  Running           192.168.64.11    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
                                          172.17.0.1               

Learn more about an instance

$ multipass info dancing-chipmunk

Name:           dancing-chipmunk
State:          Running
Snapshots:      0
IPv4:           192.168.64.8
Release:        Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Image hash:     e2608bfdbc44 (Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)
CPU(s):         1
Load:           5.70 4.58 2.63
Disk usage:     3.3GiB out of 4.8GiB
Memory usage:   769.0MiB out of 953.0MiB
Mounts:         --

Connect to a running instance

$ multipass shell dancing-chipmunk

Welcome to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (GNU/Linux 6.8.0-39-generic aarch64)
...

Don't forget to logout (or Ctrl-D) or you may find yourself heading all the way down Inception levels... ;)

Run commands inside an instance from outside

$ multipass exec dancing-chipmunk -- lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:  Ubuntu
Description:     Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Release:         24.04
Codename:        noble

Stop an instance to save resources

$ multipass stop dancing-chipmunk

Delete an instance

$ multipass delete dancing-chipmunk

The instance will now show up as deleted:

$ multipass list

Name                    State             IPv4             Image
dancing-chipmunk        Deleted           --               Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
phlegmatic-bluebird     Stopped           --               Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
docker                  Running           192.168.64.11    Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
                                          172.17.0.1               

If you want to completely get rid of it:

$ multipass purge

Get help

multipass help
multipass help <command>

Start developing Multipass

Here's a set of steps to build the Multipass source code on Linux.

Please note that these instructions do not support building packages for macOS or Windows systems.

Build dependencies

cd <multipass>
sudo apt install devscripts equivs
mk-build-deps -s sudo -i

Build Multipass

cd <multipass>
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make

Please note that if you're working on a forked repository that you created using the "Copy the main branch only" option, the repository will not include the necessary git tags to determine the Multipass version during CMake configuration. In this case, you need to manually fetch the tags from the upstream by running git fetch --tags https://github.com/canonical/multipass.git in the <multipass> source code directory.

Run the Multipass daemon and client

First, install Multipass's runtime dependencies. On AMD64 architecture, you can do this with:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libgl1 libpng16-16 libqt6core6 libqt6gui6 \
    libqt6network6 libqt6widgets6 libxml2 libvirt0 dnsmasq-base \
    dnsmasq-utils qemu-system-x86 qemu-utils libslang2 iproute2 \
    iptables iputils-ping libatm1 libxtables12 xterm

Then run the Multipass daemon:

sudo <multipass>/build/bin/multipassd &

Copy the desktop file that Multipass clients expect to find in your home:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/multipass/
cp <multipass>/data/multipass.gui.autostart.desktop ~/.local/share/multipass/

Optionally, enable auto-complete in Bash:

source <multipass>/completions/bash/multipass

Now you can use the multipass command from your terminal (for example <multipass>/build/bin/multipass launch --name foo) or launch the GUI client with the command <multipass>/build/bin/multipass.gui.

Contributing guidelines

The Multipass team appreciates contributions to the project, through pull requests, issues, or discussions and questions on the Discourse forum.

Please read the following guidelines carefully before contributing to the project.

Code of Conduct

When contributing, you must adhere to the Code of Conduct.

Copyright

The code in this repository is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE for more information.

License agreement

All contributors must sign the Canonical contributor license agreement (CLA), which gives Canonical permission to use the contributions. Without the CLA, contributions cannot be accepted.

Pull requests

Changes to this project should be proposed as pull requests. Proposed changes will then go through review and once approved, be merged into the main branch.

Additional information

Multipass documentation