gvm-tools 26.0.0

Tools to control a GSM/GVM over GMP or OSP

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
• Installation
  • Requirements
  • Version
• Usage
  • gvm-cli
    • Examples
  • gvm-script
    • Example script
    • More example scripts
  • gvm-pyshell
    • Example program use
• Support
• Maintainer
• Contributing
• License

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.