Python API to the VirtualBox VM

One of the important advantages of the VirtualBox virtualization solution is powerful public API allowing to control every aspect of virtual machine configuration and execution. Last month I was working on Python and Java bindings to that API. Those bindings are shipped with VirtualBox 2.0 SDK.

There are two families of API bindings:

* remote, over SOAP
* local, using XPCOM

SOAP allows to control remote VMs over HTTP, while XPCOM is much more high-performing and exposes certain functionality not available with SOAP. They use very different technologies (SOAP is procedural, while XPCOM is OOP), but as it is ultimately API to the same functionality of the VirtualBox, we kept in bindings original semantics, so other that connection establishment, code could be written in such a way that people may not care what communication channel with VirtualBox instance is used. As an example of how flexible and powerful those API are, I developed extensible Python command line shell to the ViritualBox, usable as simpler CLI alternative to GUI. Same shell code can work with either SOAP or XPCOM connection to the VirtualBox. To start XPCOM version of shell:

* download VirtualBox 2.0 for your platform (Linux and Solaris Python bindings officially supported)
* download SDK
* unpack SDK
* cd sdk/bindings/xpcom/python/sample
* export VBOX_PROGRAM_PATH=/opt/VirtualBox-2.0.0/ PYTHONPATH=..:$VBOX_PROGRAM_PATH
* ./vboxshell.py to start the shell

Currently shell is capable to start/suspend/resume/powerdown VMs, and persistently set any VM variable. You can easily extend shell with your own command, for example let's implement command to show information on hard disk of the machine.

def showvdiCmd(ctx, args):
mach = argsToMach(ctx,args)
if mach == None:
return 0
hdd = mach.getHardDisk(ctx['ifaces'].StorageBus.IDE, 0, 0)
print 'HDD0 info: id=%s desc="%s" size=%dM location=%s' %(hdd.id,hdd.description,hdd.size,hdd.location)
return 0


and add following line to commands map:

'vdiinfo':['Show VDI info', showvdiCmd],

Then you can run it like this: vdiinfo Win32 (or however your VM of interest is named). Easy, isn't it? Moreover this command will work not only with XPCOM bindings, but with SOAP too. This example also shows how to access VirtualBox constants in toolkit neutral manner - 'ifaces' field of context contains reflection information useadble to get values of the constant.

Actually, there are other languages bindings to VirtualBox API shipped with SDK, including Java and C++, but I personally find Python easiest for start. You can ask here questions on VirtualBox language bindings (not only Python), and I will try to help.