vbox 0.2.5

VirtualBox CLI bindings

License: BSD.

Yet another Python library of Python bindings for Virtual Box CLI (Command Line Interface).

Motivation

It appears that VirtualBox binary API is rather unstable, while CLI interface is quite stable. Plus, using binary interface means that one has to compile bindings library for particular host being used. This can be not as simple as it should be on some systems (e.g. Windows). Binary bindings are also of a concern when packaging ones’ program in to the redistributable packages.

To the best of my current knowledge, the only competing project worth noting is pyvb. But it seems to be rather dead at the moment with last release dating back to the 2008. And its GPL license is sadly not really suitable for my current needs.

Features

The main difference of this library of bindings is that I am making “smart” objective bindings rather just set of Python functions that call corresponding CLI commands.

I am attempting to hide as much of low-level VM management as possible and to represent all VM–related entities (NICs, HDDs, etc. ) as Python objects with functions of their own and properties parsed to their corresponding Python objects. Plus, I am attempting to make more consistent interface than VirtualBox’es CLI is.

Requirements

Just a reasonably recent version of Python.

How do I use it?

Deployment

You should be able to install this project via easy_install vbox route.

Alternatively, you can include this library as git submodule. If you do that, please make sure to include this projects’ release branch, not master. As release is the one that will contain versions of code that were actually released to the VBox pypy package page , so you will get automatic code updates than, but won’t get all the frustration of me accidentally breaking something via committing stuff to the master branch (that is development/testing branch).

API

I will write this part eventually. Please refer to the VBox tests for now.

Creating VM

VM with no drives and default amounts of RAM for the selected OS type is created with the following command:

import vbox

vm = vbox.VM(
    vbox.General(
        name="foo",
        osType="Windows95",
    ),
    vbox.Storage(),
)

VM with 10gb HDD and an empty DVD drive

import vbox

vm = vbox.VM(
    vbox.General(
        name="foo",
        osType="Windows95",
    ),
    vbox.Storage(
        api.HDD(size=10*1024),
        api.DVD(),
    ),
)

VM object API

1. vm.start()

2. vm.powerOff()

3. vm.wait(timeout=None) – wait for machine to get from running state to some other state.

Contributions

Please do feel free to email me your suggestions on how to improve this library. Just email me (address can be found in the setup.py file or just googled for).

Can I has code?

Sure. That is why I am hosting VBox on the GitHub. :-)