virtpwn is a lightweight yet powerful command line libvirt frontend inspired by Vagrant. It is essentially a VM manager automating boring tasks that should be done for you automatically.

virtpwn is young and under "heavy" development, so now is great time hack it up to suit your needs. I'll respond to (reasonable) feature requests and even hack it for you, feel free to create issues.

• Fast and effortless creation, deletion and control of VMs.
• Each VM is associated with directory of your choice and it's controlled by issuing commands in that directory without the need to specify an ID.
• Detect VM IP and eliminate the need for using it.
• Provisioning using Fabric. (ready for chef/puppet support)
• Easily SSH to VM. (virtpwn ssh)
• Easily mount VM filesystem using sshfs. (virtpwn mount)
• Automatically mount VM filesystem on start.
• Configure your VM using nice YAML config.
• virtpwn uses virt command line tools and can show you the exact commands used. (-c)

Once you have your machine config up, it's a matter of one command to create new machine, provision it and SSH to it:

virtpwn ssh

Time to kill the machine and start anew:

virtpwn delete
virtpwn up

Updated provisioning scripts, let's test them:

virtpwn provision

Let's copy some files to the VM:

virtpwn mount
cp something mnt/tmp

virtpwn requires:

• python modules:
  • argh
  • blessings
  • lxml
• virt command line tools:
  • virsh libvirt client
  • virt-clone
• fabric
• sshpass
• fuse-sshfs

Install these using your favourite package manager. Something like this might work on Fedora:

yum install python-argh python-blessings python-lxml libvirt-client
    virt-install fabric sshpass

If some of them aren't packaged, fastest way is to use pip or when everything else fails, easy_install. I for one like to have latest Fabric since my distro ships a terribly old version, so:

pip install --user fabric

After you managed to install the above requirements:

git clone https://github.com/yac/virtpwn.git
cd virtpwn
# use develop mode to allow comfortable hacking
python setup.py develop --user
# or just install
python setup.py install --user

After this, virtpwn executable should be in ~/.local/bin so either add it to $PATH or copy/symlink to appropriate location.

Being lazy person, I create a vm alias for virtpwn:

# optional
cd `dirname $(which virtpwn)`
ln -s virtpwn vm

After that, just create a directory with machine.yml config file.

mkdir foovm
cd foovm
cp $VIRTPWN_SOURCE/examples/basic-machine/machine.yml .
edit machine.yml

Given the base virt domain specified in the config exists and requirements are met, you're good to go:

virtpwn up

To get all available commands, use

virtpwn help

Config documentation is missing so far, but I try to have everything covered by examples.

Have fun!

• virtpwn init to create basic machine.yml
• m0ar documentation!
  • config file and provisioning
  • debugging and such
  • howto get nice base image using Oz
• make Fabric optional