This is a Bash script I use to spin up and configure Multipass instances for research and development purposes.
By default Multipass instances only have 1GB of RAM, 5GB of disk, and 1 CPU, which is not enough for me, so I've hardcoded some better defaults (8GB of RAM, 20GB of disk, and 4 CPUs). This can be overridden at the command line.
The script adds your SSH public key to the instance's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file and updates ~/.ssh/config on the host so you can connect to it over SSH. This way it's possible to use the Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH extension for development work within the instance.
It also updates the maximum number of files that can be watched in the instance. I was running into errors when opening large repositories in VS Code (looking at you, Umbraco 🧐), and this appeared to be the solution. See "Visual Studio Code is unable to watch for file changes in this large workspace" (error ENOSPC).
Download the script, make it executable, and run:
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stvnhrlnd/multipass-launch-script/main/mpl.sh
chmod u+x mpl.sh
./mpl.sh -hI also have the script on my PATH so I can run it from anywhere without typing the full path at the command line.
Any options after a -- by itself will be passed through to the multipass launch command under the hood, in case you want to specify a name for the VM, different specs, or a different image:
./mpl.sh --ssh-key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub -- --name bobby --cpus 2 --disk 10G --memory 4G jammySee the multipass launch docs for all available options.
It works on my machine.