Tom Dean - 2/2/23

Wouldn't it be nice if you could have your own personal mini-cloud running in the confines of your Ubuntu Linux environment? 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!

Multipass Multipass Documentation Install Multipass Using cloud-init with Multipass Multipass Tutorial: Linux Multipass: GitHub Repository

Installation is straightforward, using snap:

sudo snap install multipass

multipass 1.11.0 from Canonical✓ installed

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

sudo snap remove multipass

2023-02-03T00:42:15Z INFO Waiting for "snap.multipass.multipassd.service" to stop.
multipass removed

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

multipass version

We should get a result similar to:

multipass   1.11.0

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!

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

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:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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

multipass list

We should see something like this:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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?

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:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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 shells session:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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:

PUT OUTPUT HERE

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!

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

Using cloud-init with Multipass Multipass Tutorial: Linux

By using Multipass, we can leverage the power of Ubuntu Linux and cloud-init to manage our own little private cloud, in the comfort of our Ubuntu Linux environment.

Enjoy!

Tom Dean