Setting up a local Ubuntu environment on a Mac

In this guide, we will walk you through setting up a local Ubuntu environment on a Mac. This guide is intended for software engineers who are working on the Seshat project and need to set up a local development environment.

We will use multipass to create a virtual machine running Ubuntu on your Mac. Multipass is a lightweight VM manager for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It’s designed for developers who need a fresh Ubuntu environment with a single command.

Prerequisites

You will need to have Homebrew installed on your Mac to install multipass. If you need to install Homebrew, you can find instructions on how to do so on Homebrew’s website.

Steps

1. Install multipass with brew:

   $ brew install multipass
   

   • Note: the images used by Multipass don’t have a pre-installed graphical desktop

2. Create a VM (Ubuntu 22.04)

   $ multipass launch 22.04
   

   • This should create a VM called primary by default

3. Make sure the VM has enough resources:

   $ multipass stop primary
   $ multipass set local.primary.cpus=4
   $ multipass set local.primary.disk=60G
   $ multipass set local.primary.memory=8G
   $ multipass start primary
   

4. Mount the dir containing the database dump to the VM:

   $ multipass mount /path/to/database_dumps/ primary:database_dumps
   

5. Then log in to the VM with multipass shell and install pre-requisites:

   $ sudo apt update
   $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
   $ sudo apt install python3.8 -y
   $ sudo apt install python3.8-venv -y
   $ sudo apt-get install python3.8-dev -y
   $ sudo apt-get install g++ -y