VirtualBox Ruby Gem

The VirtualBox ruby gem is a library which allows anyone to control VirtualBox from ruby code! Create, destroy, start, stop, suspend, and resume virtual machines. Also list virtual machines, list hard drives, network devices, etc.

Installation and Requirements

First you need to install VirtualBox which is available for Windows, Linux, and OS X. After installation, install the gem:

sudo gem install virtualbox

The gem assumes that VBoxManage will be available on the PATH. If not, before using the gem, you must set the path to your VBoxManage binary:

VirtualBox::Command.vboxmanage = "/path/to/my/VBoxManage"

Basic Usage

The virtualbox gem is modeled after ActiveRecord. If you've used ActiveRecord, you'll feel very comfortable using the virtualbox gem.

There is a quick getting started guide to get you acquainted with the conventions of the virtualbox gem.

Complete documentation can be found at http://mitchellh.github.com/virtualbox.

Below are some examples:

require 'virtualbox'

vm = VirtualBox::VM.find("my-vm")

# Let's first print out some basic info about the VM
puts "Memory: #{vm.memory}"

vm.storage_controllers.each do |sc|
  sc.attached_devices.each do |device|
    puts "Attached Device: #{device.uuid}"
  end
end

# Let's modify the memory and name...
vm.memory = 360
vm.name = "my-renamed-vm"

# Save it!
vm.save

Or here is an example of creating a hard drive:

require 'virtualbox'

hd = VirtualBox::HardDrive.new
hd.location = "foo.vdi"
hd.size = 2000 # megabytes
hd.save

Known Issues or Uncompleted Features

VirtualBox has a ton of features! As such, this gem is still not totally complete. You can see the features that are still left to do in the TODO file.

Reporting Bugs or Feature Requests

Please use the issue tracker.

Contributing

If you'd like to contribute to VirtualBox, the first step to developing is to clone this repo, get bundler if you don't have it already, and do the following:

bundle install
bundle lock
rake

This will run the test suite, which should come back all green! Then you're good to go!

Special Thanks

These folks went above and beyond with contributions to the virtualbox gem, and for that, I have to say "thanks!"

• Kieran Pilkington
• Aleksey Palazhchenko