Multipass cannot connect to /run/multipass_socket in GitHub Actions ubuntu-latest VM

[sirredbeard]

I am attempting to automate the building and publishing of a snap to the Snap store in the ubuntu-latest VM in GitHub Actions.

Snapcraft relies on multipass for building snaps. Invoking multipass fails on the ubuntu-latest VM on GitHub Actions with the following errors:

$ sudo multipass list
list failed: cannot connect to the multipass socket
Please ensure multipassd is running and '/run/multipass_socket' is accessible

$ snapcraft
Launching a VM.
launch failed: cannot connect to the multipass socket
Please ensure multipassd is running and '/run/multipass_socket' is accessible

I have attempted the following remediation:

• Adding sudo chown root:root / to my workflow
• Ensuring my VM user is in sudo group with sudo usermod -aG sudo $USER
• Manually starting multipassd with sudo snap start multipass before invoked
• Ensuring permissions are set properly the socket sudo chown $USER:$USER /run/multipass_socket but this fails without a sudo touch /run/multipass_socket because it can never find /run/multipass_socket

To duplicate:

• Create a new GitHub repository on an account with GitHub Actions enabled.
• Create a new workflow.
• Copy and paste GitHub Actions workflow from here.
• Run workflow.

Use case:

Ubuntu is the primary Linux distro on GitHub actions and comes with snapd pre-installed. Snaps are an excellent way to handle dependencies when building with GitHub Actions. It would be useful to be able to build snaps on the same platform. GitHub Actions support would be particularly useful for pushing new releases from GitHub to the Snap store.

[townsend2010]

Hi @sirredbeard,

It sounds to me multipassd is failing to start for some reason. Is there any way to look at journalctl and search through the errors to find why multipassd is failing? The quickest way would be to try to start multipass and then go to the end of the journal and look at the errors.

[sirredbeard]

The solution to this problem is to use the Snapcraft Docker container instead of the raw Ubuntu VM on GitHub actions. Snapcraft, multipass, and everything work fine in that managed container.

[townsend2010]

@sirredbeard,

Thanks for letting us know that you found a solution. We'll keep it in mind if someone else runs up against this issue in the future.

[LyzardKing]

sorry for posting in a closed issue, but what if the docker container is not good enough?
I need to build a core18 snap, but the docker image will not work properly:
The following snaps are required but not installed as snapcraft is running inside docker or podman container: core18.

[Saviq]

@LyzardKing that doesn't seem like a Multipass issue?

[TravisEz13]

It would be nice if this someone would work with the Azure Dev Ops team to get this working.