libguestfs, library for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images

Downloads

For source see the downloads directory.

In Fedora 11+ or EPEL, you just need to do: 

yum install '*guestfs*' guestfish

For Debian, Ubuntu and other distributions.

Mailing list and chat

Join us on the libguestfs mailing list, or on IRC channel #libguestfs on FreeNode.

Documentation

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and guestfish recipes page

guestfs(3) — main API documentation
guestfish(1) — interactive shell
guestmount(1) — mount guest filesystem in host
virt-cat(1) — display a file
virt-df(1) — free space
virt-edit(1) — edit a file
virt-inspector(1) — inspect VM images
virt-list-filesystems(1) — list filesystems
virt-ls(1) — list files
virt-rescue(1) — rescue shell
virt-tar(1) — archive and upload files
virt-win-reg(1) — read Windows Registry
hivex(3) — extract Windows Registry hive
hivexsh(1) — Windows Registry hive shell
hivexml(1) — convert Windows Registry hive to XML
hivexget(1) — extract data from Windows Registry hive

For developers: README, TODO, HACKING. FAQ.

Bug reports

List of bugs in libguestfs and in Fedora packaging of libguestfs

Enter a new bug report

Git repository

git clone git://git.annexia.org/git/libguestfs.git

Latest version: 1.0.83 released 2010-02-05

libguestfs is a library for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. Amongst the things this is good for: making batch configuration changes to guests, viewing and editing files inside guests (virt-cat, virt-edit), getting disk used/free statistics (virt-df), migrating between virtualization systems (virt-p2v), performing partial backups, performing partial guest clones, cloning VMs and changing registry/UUID/hostname info, and much else besides.

libguestfs can access any type of filesystem including but not limited to: ext2/3/4, btrfs, FAT and NTFS, LVM, many different disk partition schemes, qcow2, vmdk.

libguestfs is a library that can be linked with C and C++ management programs and has bindings for OCaml, Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, Haskell and C#. You can also use it from shell scripts or the command line. With FUSE support you can also mount guest filesystems on the host (guestmount). 

$ guestfish --ro -i Fedora11-vm.img
><fs> lvs
/dev/vg_f11x64/lv_root
/dev/vg_f11x64/lv_swap
><fs> cat /etc/redhat-release 
Fedora release 11 (Leonidas)

For more examples using guestfish see the guestfish recipes page. For other examples see these blog entries.

This software is distibuted under the terms of the GNU GPL version 2 or above.

rjones AT redhat DOT com

$Id: index.html,v 1.30 2010/02/05 18:59:06 rjones Exp $