A Beginner’s Guide to Multipass: Create and Manage Ubuntu VMs in Minutes

Whether you’re developing, testing or deploying your application or you have to work with different OS or some other reasons, you might have created virtual machines. Like me, you might have explored different virtualization tools such as Oracle VirtualBox or VMware Workstation and downloading the OS image, allocating resources, interacting with the VM can be messy. Last year, I discovered Multipass which provides simpler and cleaner way of creating and maintaining Ubuntu instances with intuitive CLI commands.

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. This blog will show you how easy is to be create and manage Ubuntu VMs (instances) using Multipass.

Multipass is available for Linux, macOs, or Windows. To install it on your OS of choice, please follow the instructions given here. Note: This tutorial demonstrates use on Linux, specifically Ubuntu, but the experience on any OS should be similar.

Install Multipass

To get started with Multipass, you’ll need to install it first. Multipass is available as a snap package in Linux. So, make sure you have snap installed. Verify if snap is installed or not with following command

snap --version

If snap is not installed, install it by running following commands

# update and upgrade the packages to latest version
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

# install snapd
sudo apt install snapd

Once snap is installed successfully, install Multipass by simply running

sudo snap install multipass

After Multipass is installed, you can verify and check details about the Multipass with snap info command:

snap info multipass

If you want to uninstall/remove Multipass from the system, you can simply run

snap remove multipass

Create an Ubuntu Instance

With Multipass, all it takes is a single command multipass launch to create an instance

multipass launch

This creates a new ubuntu virtual machine with default settings, using the latest Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) version as a base image.

You can also create instance with specific OS image as well. To find out what images are available, just run

multipass find

This command will display a list of all currently available images. Depending on the time you’re reading this blog, different images might be available over time.

To launch an instance with a specific image , pass the image name or alias to multipass launch . If you want to give specific name to the instance, add --name option to the command line

multipass launch 22.04 --name myUbuntuInstance

Running above command creates an Ubuntu 22.04 instance named myUbuntuInstance. To get more details about the instance, simply run

multipass info myUbuntuInstance

By default, Multipass will assign 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, and 5GB disk space. We can specify resources explicitly as well when creating an instance

multipass launch 22.04 --name myUbuntuInstance2 --disk 10G --memory 2G

Above command will create an Ubuntu 22.04 instance named myUbuntuInstance2 with 2GB RAM and 10GB disk space. You can verify configuration and resources with multipass info command

With multipass list command, you can view all the instances

Connect to the Instance

Now, to connect to the Ubuntu instances, simply run multipass shell instance-name

multipass shell myUbuntuInstance

This will start the instance if it is stopped or suspended and open the shell prompt. By default, you will be logged in as ubuntu user.

Now you’re connected to your Ubuntu instance. Just like any other Ubuntu installation, you can run commands and explore it. If you want to exit from the instance, simply run exit or press Cntrl+D .

Manage Instances

Now that you’ve created your instance, Multipass offers range commands to start, stop, restart, and even remove your instances with ease:

Start an Instance

To start an instance, simply run

multipass start instance-name

# starting myUbuntuInstance
multipass start myUbuntuInstance

You can start multiple instances or all instances at once with following command

# start multiple instances
multipass start myUbuntuInstance myUbuntuInstance2

# start all instances
multipass start --all

To restart, just run

# restarting myUbuntuInstance
multipass restart myUbuntuInstance

Stop the Instance

To stop the server, simply run

multipass stop instance-name

# stopping  myUbuntuInstance
multipass stop myUbuntuInstance

You can stop multiple instances or all instances at once with following command

# stop multiple instances
multipass stop myUbuntuInstance myUbuntuInstance2

# stop all instances
multipass stop --all

Remove an Instance

You can remove an instance, either temporarily or permanently. To remove an instance temporarily i.e. move an instance to the ‘recycle bin’, you can execute below command:

multipass delete myUbuntuInstance

Now, if you list the instances, you will see that it is actually just marked for deletion (or to put it in other words, moved to the recycle bin):

Since this instance has been marked as deleted and not deleted permanently, it can later be recovered:

If you want to delete an instance permanently, you first have to delete it and then purge:

# mark the instance as deleted
multipass delete myUbuntuInstance

# remove it permantenly
multipass purge

The multipass purge command will permanently remove all instances deleted with the multipass delete . This will destroy all the traces of the instance, and cannot be undone.

The multipass CLI (command line interface) client is used to communicate with the Multipass service to create, manage, and interact with Multipass instances using various subcommands. You can learn more about various commands available here which allows you to interact with a Multipass instance.

Multipass offers a refreshingly simple and user-friendly approach to creating and managing Ubuntu virtual machines. Dive deeper into the official documentation to unlock the full potential of Multipass and explore advanced VM management features!