See also: How to manage instances, Instance states, Mount
An instance is a virtual machine created and managed by Multipass.
For more information on the naming convention, see Instance name format.
Primary instance
The Multipass Command-Line Interface (CLI) provides a few shortcuts using a special instance, called primary instance. By default, this is the instance named primary.
When invoked without positional arguments, state transition commands — start, restart, stop, and suspend — operate on this special instance. So does the shell command. Furthermore, start and shell create the primary instance if it does not yet exist.
When creating the primary instance, the Multipass CLI client automatically mounts the user’s home directory into it. As with any other mount, it can be unmounted with multipass umount. For instance, the command multipass umount primary will unmount all mounts made by Multipass inside the primary instance, including the auto-mounted Home.
On Windows, mounts are disabled by default for security reasons. For more details, see Mount - Security considerations.
In all other respects, the primary instance is the same as any other instance. Its properties are the same as if it had been launched manually with multipass launch --name primary.
Selecting the primary instance
The name of the instance that the Multipass CLI treats as primary can be modified with the setting client.primary-name. This setting determines the name of the instance that Multipass creates and operates as primary, providing a mechanism to turn any existing instance into the primary instance, as well as disabling the primary feature.
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