multipass

Multipass is a lightweight virtual machine manager developed by Canonical and available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. It is aimed at developers who need a fresh Ubuntu environment quickly: a single command launches a preconfigured VM without manual installation steps. Under the hood, Multipass relies on the platform's native hypervisor to keep overhead low: KVM on Linux, Hyper-V on Windows, and QEMU on macOS. VirtualBox can also be used as a driver on Windows and macOS. The tool automatically fetches Ubuntu images and keeps them up to date, so instances start from a current base image. Because Multipass supports cloud-init metadata, it can simulate a small cloud deployment on a laptop or workstation, which is useful for testing provisioning scripts and cloud-oriented workflows locally. Day-to-day operation is handled through a command-line interface. Commands documented in the README include: - multipass find: list available images - multipass launch lts: start an instance running the current Ubuntu LTS - multipass list: list existing instances - multipass info: show details about an instance - multipass shell: open a shell in a running instance - multipass exec: run a command inside an instance - multipass stop, delete, and purge: stop, delete, and permanently remove instances - multipass help: built-in help for commands Installation: on Linux, Multipass is distributed as a snap (sudo snap install multipass). On macOS and Windows, installers are published on the GitHub releases page. A Homebrew cask exists for macOS but is community-maintained and not officially supported. The README notes that macOS installation may require entering a password for sudo operations, and that the firewall may need to be disabled to launch an instance successfully. For building from source, the project provides platform-specific build guides (BUILD.linux.md, BUILD.macOS.md, BUILD.windows.md). With CMake 3.29 or newer, the build system can automatically locate and use the mold or lld linker in place of the toolchain's default linker to accelerate builds; this can be overridden by setting CMAKE_LINKER_TYPE at the CMake configure step. The project runs CI on Linux, Windows, and macOS via GitHub Actions, publishes builds to the Snap Store, and tracks code coverage through Codecov. Community-led integrations listed in the README include an MCP server (WangYihang/multipass-mcp), two Terraform providers (todoroff/terraform-provider-multipass and larstobi/terraform-provider-multipass), and two Visual Studio Code extensions for running and managing instances. Contributions are accepted through pull requests, issues, and discussions, with changes reviewed before merging into the main branch. The code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.