It's a system that orchestrates the creation, management and maintenance of virtual machines and associated Ubuntu images to simplify development.
On Linux it's available as a classically confined snap, in the beta channel:
sudo snap install multipass --beta --classic
For macOS we provide installers on GitHub.
multipass launch --name foo
multipass exec foo lsb_release -a
multipass launch -n foo --cloud-init cloud-config.yaml
See Using cloud-init with Multipass on the Ubuntu blog for more details.
multipass find
multipass help
multipass help <command>
Here's a set of steps to build and run your own build of multipass:
cd <multipass>
apt install devscripts equivs
mk-build-deps -s sudo -i
cd <multipass>
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../
make
sudo <multipass>/build/bin/multipassd &
<multipass>/build/bin/multipass launch --name foo
<multipass>/build/bin/multipass shell foo