How to Quickly Set Up Lightweight Ubuntu VMs with Multipass – A Complete Guide

For IT professionals, VMware is widely used but costly and less friendly for beginners; this article introduces Multipass, a free, lightweight virtual machine tool from Canonical.

Multipass Overview

Multipass is a lightweight command‑line VM manager supporting Linux, Windows, and macOS, using the appropriate virtualization technology on each OS and consuming minimal resources.

Installation

Download the installer for your operating system from https://multipass.run/install.

After installation, verify the version:

$ multipass version

Using Multipass

Create an Ubuntu VM

List available Ubuntu images: $ multipass find Launch a container named dg: $ multipass launch --name dg Check the VM’s description:

$ multipass exec dg -- lsb_release -d

Manage VMs

List all VMs: $ multipass list Show detailed information: $ multipass info --all Enter the VM shell: $ multipass shell dg Pause and start the VM:

# pause
$ multipass stop dg
# start
$ multipass start dg

Delete and purge the VM:

# delete
$ multipass delete dg
# purge
$ multipass purge dg

Automation with cloud‑init

Use --cloud-init to run initialization scripts on first launch. Example config.yaml installs Node.js and the LeanCloud CLI:

#cloud-config
runcmd:
  - curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash -
  - sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
  - wget https://releases.leanapp.cn/leancloud/lean-cli/releases/download/v0.21.0/lean-cli-x64.deb
  - sudo dpkg -i lean-cli-x64.deb

Conclusion

Multipass enables rapid provisioning of Ubuntu virtual machines for testing, small database clusters, or other experiments, though it only supports Ubuntu images.

Related Links

Official site: https://multipass.run/

Documentation: https://multipass.run/docs/