vbox-sdk 5.1.18-0

The VirtualBox Software Developer Kit as available from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Oracle provides this SDK to interface with VirtualBox. In the main branch, everything is exactly as it would be if you were to download the kit directly from Oracle (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads), except for the README, LICENSE, Makefile, and setup.py files.

In this branch, only the original (Python 2) libraries remain. This is to make checkouts smaller that only need those few files. Nothing else about the files has changed from the version made available by Oracle.

The code is available on Github and PyPI.

Installation

Since the package is listed on PyPI, you can install it with:

pip install vbox_sdk

Please note that this package conflicts with the vboxapi package.

Usage

I won’t attempt to document the full API since I’m not the maintainer of the actual code. However, if, like me, all you’re trying to do is manage the VMs in VirtualBox, you’ll want to check out the vboxapi.VirtualBoxManager class in particular. From the SDK Reference manual, here’s an example of how to use the manager to perform some basic tasks:

from vboxapi import VirtualBoxManager
mgr = VirtualBoxManager(None, None)
vbox = mgr.vbox
name = "Linux"
mach = vbox.findMachine(name)
session = mgr.getSessionObject(vbox)
progress = mach.launchVMProcess(session, "gui", "")
progress.waitForCompletion(-1)
mgr.closeMachineSession(session)

License

Although I’ve listed this repository as being licensed under “The Unlicense”, I am not the originator of the code. The license information in SDKRef.pdf (in the docs folder) contains this explanation of the code’s license:

The sample code files shipped with the SDK are generally licensed liberally to make it easy for anyone to use this code for their own application code.

The Java files under bindings/webservice/java/jax-ws/ (library files for the object-oriented web service) are, by contrast, licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) V2.1.

See sdk/bindings/webservice/java/jax-ws/src/COPYING.LIB for the full text of the LGPL 2.1.

When in doubt, please refer to the individual source code files shipped with this SDK.

My hope is that by storing the SDK here, it will be of use to those who want to install the library from pip as well as those working with Git repositories exclusively, but I cannot take responsibility for the code as provided by Oracle.