Greenbone Vulnerability Management Tools
The Greenbone Vulnerability Management Tools gvm-tools are a collection of
tools that help with remote controlling a Greenbone Enterprise Appliance and
Greenbone Community Edition installations. The tools aid in accessing the
communication protocols GMP (Greenbone Management Protocol) and OSP
(Open Scanner Protocol).
This module is comprised of interactive and non-interactive clients. The programming language Python is supported directly for interactive scripting. But it is also possible to issue remote GMP/OSP commands without programming in Python.
Table of Contents
Documentation
The documentation for gvm-tools can be found at
https://greenbone.github.io/gvm-tools/.
Please refer to the documentation for more details as this README just
gives a short overview.
Installation
See the documentation for all supported installation options.
Requirements
Python 3.10 and later is supported.
Version
Please consider to always use the newest version of gvm-tools and python-gvm.
We frequently update this projects to add features and keep them free from bugs.
This is why installing gvm-tools using pip is recommended.
To use gvm-tools with an old GMP version (7, 8, 9) you must use a release version
that is <21.06, combined with an python-gvm version <21.05.
In the 21.06 release the support of these older versions has been dropped.
Usage
There are several clients to communicate via GMP/OSP.
All clients have the ability to build a connection in various ways:
- Unix Socket
- TLS Connection
- SSH Connection
gvm-cli
This tool sends plain GMP/OSP commands and prints the result to the standard output.
Examples
Return the current protocol version used by the server:
gvm-cli socket --xml "<get_version/>"
Return all tasks visible to the GMP user with the provided credentials:
gvm-cli --gmp-username foo --gmp-password bar socket --xml "<get_tasks/>"
Read a file with GMP commands and return the result:
gvm-cli --gmp-username foo --gmp-password bar socket myfile.xml
Note that gvm-cli will by default print an error message and exit with a
non-zero exit code when a command is rejected by the server. If this kind of
error handling is not desired, the unparsed XML response can be requested using
the --raw parameter:
gvm-cli socket --raw --xml "<authenticate/>"
gvm-script
This tool has a lot more features than the simple gvm-cli client. You
have the possibility to create your own custom gmp or osp scripts with commands
from the python-gvm library and from
Python 3 itself.
Example script
# Retrieve current GMP version
version = gmp.get_version()
# Prints the XML in beautiful form
from gvmtools.helper import pretty_print
pretty_print(version)
# Retrieve all tasks
tasks = gmp.get_tasks()
# Get names of tasks
task_names = tasks.xpath('task/name/text()')
pretty_print(task_names)
More example scripts
There is a growing collection of gmp-scripts in the "scripts/" folder. Some of them might be exactly what you need and all of them help writing your own gmp scripts.
gvm-pyshell
This tool is for running gmp or osp scripts interactively. It provides the same API as gvm-script using the python-gvm library.
Example program use
Connect with given credentials via a unix domain socket and open an interactive shell:
gvm-pyshell --gmp-username user --gmp-password pass socket
Connect through SSH connection and open the interactive shell:
gvm-pyshell --hostname 127.0.0.1 ssh
Support
For any question on the usage of gvm-tools or gmp scripts please use the
Greenbone Community Portal. If you
found a problem with the software, please
create an issue on GitHub.
Maintainer
This project is maintained by Greenbone AG.
Contributing
Your contributions are highly appreciated. Please create a pull request on GitHub. For bigger changes, please discuss it first in the issues.
For development you should use uv to keep you python packages separated in different environments. First install uv via pip
python3 -m pip install --user uv
Afterwards active the git hooks for auto-formatting and linting via autohooks.
uv run autohooks activate --force
License
Copyright (C) 2017-2026 Greenbone AG
Licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.
Release files for gvm-tools 26.1.1
For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.
Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | |
|---|---|---|---|
| gvm_tools-26.1.1.tar.gz | 306.9 kB | Details |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| gvm_tools-26.1.1-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 336.7 kB
Release files / gvm_tools-26.1.1.tar.gz
| Download URL | gvm_tools-26.1.1.tar.gz |
|---|---|
| Size | 306.9 kB |
| Tags | Source |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
Yes |
| Uploaded via |
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|
Release files / gvm_tools-26.1.1-py3-none-any.whl
| Download URL | gvm_tools-26.1.1-py3-none-any.whl |
|---|---|
| Size | 29.8 kB |
| Tags | Python 3 |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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| Upload date | |
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Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
Yes |
| Uploaded via |
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|
