multipass

What is Multipass?

Multipass is a lightweight VM manager for Linux, Windows and macOS. It’s designed for developers who want to spin up a fresh Linux environment with a single command. It uses QEMU on Linux, HCS (Host Compute System) on Windows and QEMU or the Apple Virtualization Framework on macOS to run virtual machines with minimal overhead. 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.

Project status

Service	Status
CI
Snap
Codecov

Installation

For more information, see How to install Multipass.

Linux

Multipass is available as a snap:

sudo snap install multipass

macOS

Download the installer from GitHub.

Alternatively, you can use Homebrew which is not officially supported, as it is not maintained by the Multipass team, but by the community. Multipass is available as a cask:

brew install --cask multipass

Please note that you may be required to enter your password for some sudo operations during installation. You may also need to disable the firewall to launch a multipass instance successfully on macOS.

Windows

Download the installer from GitHub.

Usage

Here are some pointers to get started with Multipass.

Task	Command
List available images	multipass images
Launch an instance with the current Ubuntu LTS	multipass launch lts
List existing instances	multipass list
Get info about an instance	multipass info <instance-name>
Connect to a running instance	multipass shell <instance-name>
Run a command inside an instance	multipass exec <instance-name> -- <command>
Stop an instance	multipass stop <instance-name>
Delete an instance	multipass delete <instance-name>
Get help	multipass help multipass help <command>

For a more comprehensive learning experience, please check out the Multipass Tutorial and consult the Multipass documentation.

Building and Contributing

Building Multipass

Please follow the platform-specific build instructions in the files below:

• BUILD.linux.md for Linux
• BUILD.macOS.md for macOS
• BUILD.windows.md for Windows

Generic build tips

You may use your preferred package manager to install Multipass. Note that only the official installers are supported. See the installation guide for details.

For backend support and system requirements, refer to the Multipass driver documentation.

If you notice outdated information or inconsistencies in these files, please open an issue or, even better, submit a pull request!

You can also reference our GitHub Actions CI to see how Multipass is built and tested across platforms.

Automatic linker selection

Requires (>= CMake 3.29)

To accelerate the build, the build system will attempt to locate and utilize mold or lld (respectively) in place of the default linker of the toolchain. To override, set CMAKE_LINKER_TYPE at CMake configure step.

Contributing

The Multipass team appreciates contributions to the project, through pull requests, issues, or discussions. Changes to this project should be proposed as pull requests. Proposed changes will then go through review and once approved, be merged into the main branch.

Before contributing, please read the Contributing document carefully and follow the Contributing Guidelines.

Community-led integrations

Multipass MCP Server

• WangYihang/multipass-mcp

Terraform providers

• todoroff/terraform-provider-multipass
• larstobi/terraform-provider-multipass

Visual Studio Code extensions

• geoffreynyaga/multipass-run
• levalleyjack/multipass-manager-vscode

Copyright

The code in this repository is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE for more information.