multipass.

md 7/2/2020

Multipass - The Ultimate (cloud) virtual machine.

I have struggled with setting up VirtualBox and VMWare Player until I discovered Multipass

Multipass is such a versatile VM that runs naturally in Windows, Mac, Ubuntu, and Other Linux Favors.

It is so seamless because it runs on the commandline. You got the power to launch multiple OS boxes (Linux
of course) and play the way you want.

One thing I love about Multipass is that it is not resource hungry like other VMs.

Getting started with Multipass

A few commands to get you up to speed

Install multipass. (on Ubuntu)

sudo snap install multipass

Launch a box: launching is like installing. This needs an internet connection first time you do for an
image. You can later launch different boxes on the same image

multipass launch --name bionic

Wait for multipass to download and setup the bionic instance. By default it uses the latest (on
Multipass) image.

Starting and stopping instances

To start an instance on a name

multipass start bionic

This start the bionic instance in the background to which you can run commands.
To stop an instance on a name

multipass stop bionic

This stops an instance named bionic.

Running commands on instances

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When an instance is up and running (use multipass list to see which instances are running and at what
IP Addresses) you can send commands to it in two ways.

Run commands from host prompt

This allows you to run command from the current terminal prompt. For example to look at network
config rung this command

multipass exec -- bionic ifconfig

The format of the command is

multipass exec -- <instance-name> command

Running commands this way is inconvenient. Thankfully, multipass allows us to launch the shell for an
instance and run command directly.

Run commands from instance shell

To launch the instance shell,

multipass shell <instance-name>

This will launch the instance and the prompt will change to something like ubuntu@bionic which
allows you to run commands on the instance.

Exiting from the shell run

exit

This will take you back to the host prompt.

Getting help
You can get help on multipass by running

multipass help

As you can see, the plain help command also lists other available commands

To get help on a specific command run

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multipass help <command>

For example to get help on mounting local directory inside an instance type

multipass help mount

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