transient 0.5

A QEMU wrapper adding vagrant support and shared folders

transient

transient is thin wrapper for QEMU that provides additional features like downloading disk images, shared folders, and SSH support. Currently transient only supports Vagrant libvirt images.

Installation

transient is available on PyPI, so the latest release can be installed with pip install transient. To install transient from source, clone this repository and run pip install -e '.[dev]' from the project root. As always, the usage of python virtual environments is recommended for a development setup.

transient has dependencies on a number of packages. On ubuntu, these can be installed by running apt-get install ssh qemu-system-x86 python3-pip libguestfs-tools. Note that libguestfs-tools is only required when using the -copy-in-before and -copy-out-after flags.

Documentation

Documentation for transient is available on Read the Docs.

Quick Start

transient is primarily a wrapper for QEMU. It supplies a small set of flags that are used to add additional features to the VM being started. As the name implies, it is almost completely stateless. This avoids problems that can sometimes occur with libvirt based tools becoming 'unsynchronized' with the real system state.

For example, in the following command, the flags before the -- are passed to transient. The remaining arguments are passed directly to QEMU. This example will cause transient to download and run a Centos7 VM (from the Vagrant Cloud) with 1GB of memory using a text console. This virtual machine will be automatically shut down on exit and its disk will be destroyed.

transient run \
   -image centos/7:2004.01 \
   -- \
   -nographic -enable-kvm -m 1G

transient also supports a vagrant style SSH connection. This will start the virtual machine and connect standard input and output to an SSH connection with the machine, instead of the serial console. However, when this connection is closed, the machine will be automatically shut down (unlike vagrant). For example:

transient run \
   -ssh-console \
   -image centos/7:2004.01 \
   -- \
   -enable-kvm -m 1G

The -ssh-console flag depends on the image having the normal vagrant keypair trusted for the vagrant user.