Easy minimal Ubuntu VM on any OS

Normally we use LXC/LXD, KVM, QEMU, Docker, Vagrant, VirtualBox, VMWare or any other virtualization and containerization software to spawn a VM-like instance locally. Today we're gonna try multipass, a tool to spawn and orchestrate ubuntu VM. To install multipass, it's as easy as running these commands:

snap install multipass
ls -al /var/snap/multipass/common/multipass_socket
snap connect multipass:libvirt # if error: ensure libvirt is installed and running
snap info multipass

To spawn a VM on Ubuntu (for other OSes, see the link above), we can run:

multipass find

Image        Aliases      Version   Description
...
18.04        bionic       20220104  Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
20.04        focal,lts    20220118  Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
21.10        impish       20220118  Ubuntu 21.10
daily:22.04  devel,jammy  20220114  Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
...
minikube                  latest    minikube is local Kubernetes

multipass launch --name groovy-lagomorph lts
# 20.04 --cpus 1 --disk 5G --mem 1G

multipass list
Name                    State             IPv4             Image
groovy-lagomorph        Running           10.204.28.99     Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

multipass info --all
Name:           groovy-lagomorph
State:          Running
IPv4:           10.204.28.99
Release:        Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
Image hash:     e1264d4cca6c (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS)
Load:           0.00 0.00 0.00
Disk usage:     1.3G out of 4.7G
Memory usage:   134.2M out of 976.8M
Mounts:         --

To run shell inside newly spawned VM, we can run:

multipass shell groovy-lagomorph

multipass exec groovy-lagomorph -- bash

If you need to simulate ssh, according to this issue you can either:

sudo ssh -i /var/snap/multipass/common/data/multipassd/ssh-keys/id_rsa ubuntu@10.204.28.99

# or add ssh key before launch on cloud-init.yaml
ssh_authorized_keys:
  - <your_ssh_key>

# or copy ssh key manually after launch
sudo ssh-copy-id -f -o 'IdentityFile=/var/snap/multipass/common/data/multipassd/ssh-keys/id_rsa' -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub ubuntu@10.204.28.99

If to stop/start/delete the VM:

multipass stop groovy-lagomorph
multipass start groovy-lagomorph
multipass delete groovy-lagomorph
multipass purge

What technology used by multipass? it's QEMU, but maybe it's different on another platform (it can run on Windows and MacOSX too).