dergachev/vagrant-vbox-snapshot

include datetime in list command

bubenkoff opened this issue · 2 comments

bubenkoff commented

When you have a list like this:

http://pastebin.com/dt0tmj1M

it's critical to see the datetime of each snapshot, this info is available from vbox api for sure

please implement subj feature

dergachev commented

That would be a nice thing to have, and I briefly looked into it.

I am deliberately choosing to keep vagrant-vbox-snapshot as a simple wrapper on VBoxManage, the command-line utility for interacting with VirtualBox. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to support giving us dates:

$ VBoxManage snapshot 4e9ebfe7-4da1-44f8-b8f4-2613fa18c794 list
   Name: TEST1 (UUID: d12c8552-e27d-4b76-855a-ef35535e934d)
      Name: TEST2 (UUID: d4190710-c716-47d9-a8fd-0d78bde5993e) *

$ VBoxManage snapshot 4e9ebfe7-4da1-44f8-b8f4-2613fa18c794 list --details
   Name: TEST1 (UUID: d12c8552-e27d-4b76-855a-ef35535e934d)
      Name: TEST2 (UUID: d4190710-c716-47d9-a8fd-0d78bde5993e) *

I'm not sure if it's a bug that --details doesn't actually do anything, or a feature, but there you have it.

For the record, the no-longer-maintained repo https://github.com/t9md/vagrant-snap/blob/master/lib/vagrant_snap.rb seems to use the virtualbox ruby gem to extract this info somehow.
See https://github.com/t9md/vagrant-snap/blob/master/lib/vagrant_snap.rb#L48

In my opinion, it's not worth adding the gem dependency and maintenance overhead, even if it allows for more features like this one. Though I'd consider a pull request implementing it, I'd discourage it.

As a workaround, I recommend naming your snapshots under some scheme, and if necessary fall back to the UI:

dergachev commented

Actually it turns out VBoxManage snapshot <uuid> list --details will print out descriptions, if they were set. So we can get dates in as follows:

  • Modify vagrant snapshot take to write the current timestamp into the description
  • Implement vagrant snapshot list --details argument.

Output will look like this:

$ VBoxManage snapshot  c19950ee-9b3e-4018-a771-665cf95d09b2 list --details
   Name: TEST1 (UUID: c95a4fda-e9d1-42e7-b77a-1226cc266a42)
   Description:
Taken at 10:25AM
      Name: TEST2 (UUID: 278e4e7b-26cf-4a47-a541-c660c9e2a60d) *

The line breaks are really ugly, but that's VBoxManage for you. We could try to do something more complicated, but that's going to be too much work to maintain.

Pull requests welcome.