How to Quickly Set Up Ubuntu VMs with Multipass: A Step‑by‑Step Guide

Multipass

Multipass is a lightweight virtual‑machine command‑line tool that runs on Linux, Windows and macOS. It allows you to quickly create, manage and delete Ubuntu‑based VM instances.

Getting Started

Download and install Multipass for your operating system (example shown for Windows).

$ multipass version

Create an Ubuntu VM

List available Ubuntu images with multipass find, then launch a new instance: $ multipass launch --name dg Check the VM details:

$ multipass exec dg -- lsb_release -d

Managing the VM

View the list of instances, enter a shell, stop, start, delete and purge VMs using the corresponding multipass commands.

# List
$ multipass list
# Shell
$ multipass shell dg
# Stop
$ multipass stop dg
# Start
$ multipass start dg
# Delete
$ multipass delete dg
# Purge
$ multipass purge dg

Automation with cloud‑init

Initialize a VM with a cloud‑init configuration file to install packages automatically:

$ multipass launch --name ubuntu --cloud-init config.yaml

Example config.yaml runs commands to install Node.js and the LeanCloud CLI.

Conclusion

Multipass provides a fast way to spin up Ubuntu environments for testing, small database clusters, or other Linux experiments. Its limitation is that it only supports Ubuntu images, as it is developed by Canonical.

Official site: https://multipass.run/

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