Multipass Hosts

Small utility that generates or updates the hosts file with your multipass vm names and ip addresses. This allows accessing the vm locally using its name instead of its dynamically assigned ip address. Additionally its possible to define aliasses that allow a vm to be accessible using multiple names. When multipass assigns new ip addresses to vms you can rerun the tool to update the hosts configuration.

Installation

The utility can be installed when Go is available using:

go install github.com/sanderhahn/multipass-hosts@latest

On Linux the tool needs to be executed as root so that it is able to overwrite the /etc/hosts file:

# always run multipass-hosts as root
sudo chmod +s `which multipass-hosts`
sudo chown root:root `which multipass-hosts`

On macOS/Darwin the System Integrity Protection (SIP) which will prevent the tool from updating the /etc/hosts file, however it prints out how the file can be updated manually.

On Windows it updates the $Env:SystemRoot\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file when executed as Administrator.

Aliasses

This is possible by using aliasses that are read from the $HOME/.multipass-hosts.json file using the format:

{
  "aliasses": {
    "gitlab": [
      "gitlab.example.com",
      "example.io",
      "root.example.io",
      "repository.example.com"
    ]
  }
}

Implementation

The tool executes multipass list --format json and extracts the name and ipv4 fields. These ip addresses are added into the hosts file surrounded with comments that mark the start and end of the block.