Requirements

I recently made the switch to a Mac and found using Multipass from Canonical simpler than spinning up a VM with tools like Virtualbox. However, when it comes to container networking labs, non-Linux systems are not recommended. While I downloaded Docker Desktop for Mac, I had trouble seeing all the Docker network interfaces. For Windows users, I will advise you to use WSL2 instead, it’s easier to deploy and manage compared to having to use a virtual machine like Virtualbox. Keep in mind that the Ubuntu installation requirement is only for Mac and Linux users. This guide will use three terminal tabs throughout.

Install Homebrew and Multipass

Download Homebrew

# Terminal-1 Mac/Linux
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Download Multipass

# Terminal-1 Mac/Linux
brew install multipass

Download an Ubuntu Server from Multipass

This Ubuntu server will be customized to run the same specifications as an AWS EC2-T2 Micro instance type.

1 CPU
1 GB of RAM
8 GB of disk
version 22.04

Simple and fast, right?

# Terminal-1 Mac/Linux
multipass launch jammy --name=ubuntu --cpus=1 --disk=8G --memory=1G

jammy is the image name for Ubuntu server version 22.04.

Go to the Shell of the Ubuntu Server

# Terminal-1 Mac/Linux
multipass shell ubuntu

Install Docker

Download docker on the Ubuntu server.

# Terminal-1 Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

# Close this Ubuntu shell.
# Sometimes you might need to use the exit command severally
# to successfully exit the shell.
exit

Mount a Local Folder to an Ubuntu Directory

Mount the Documents/ folder in your Mac, or other machine to the mnt/ directory in the Ubuntu server running inside Multipass.

# Terminal-1 Mac/Linux
multipass mount /Users/apple/Documents /mnt/
Verify Ubuntu Server Installation

apple@Charles-MBP ~ % multipass info ubuntu
Name:           ubuntu
State:          Running
Snapshots:      0
IPv4:           192.168.64.4
               172.17.0.1
Release:        Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS
Image hash:     9dxa2awl28c8 (Ubuntu 22.04 LTS)
CPU(s):         1
Load:           0.00 0.00 0.00
Disk usage:     2.3GiB out of 7.7GiB
Memory usage:   201.4MiB out of 951.6MiB
Mounts:         /Users/apple/Documents => /mnt
                  UID map: 501:default
                  GID map: 20:default

Install Wireshark

Choose your preferred machine and download.