virtualbox-auto

This is a systemd service that starts and stops VirtualBox VMs on system boot and shutdown.

Installation and configuration

Download the latest release here: https://github.com/mike10004/virtualbox-auto/releases

Install by executing

$ sudo dpkg --install build/virtualbox-auto_${VERSION}_all.deb

(Replace ${VERSION} with the appropriate string.)

Specify that a VM is to be automatically started and stopped by creating a file in the configuration directory /etc/virtualbox-auto. See CONFIG.md for details, but as a quick tutorial, if you create a file named /etc/virtualbox-auto/quickstart.auto and populate it with text

{
    "id": "my_machine",
    "user": "vmowner",             
    "stop_action": "savestate"
}

...then on system boot, the service will start the VM named my_machine that is owned by vmowner, and on system shutdown the service will stop the VM with the savestate command.

Background

Everyone knows that if you want to start VMs automatically on host boot, all you need to do is read https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch09.html#autostart and voila, they start. However, if you actually go and do that, at least on Linux, you find that nothing happens. If you dig deeper, you learn that there's an init service called vboxautostart-service, but then if you dig just a little bit deeper, you find that the service is not present in VirtualBox versions 5.0 and above. Plus, it was an init service, and your PID 1 is probably systemd now, so you can't even just downgrade.

The virtualbox-auto.service systemd unit simplifies some configuration aspects of automatically starting VMs on host boot, and for better or worse it avoids using the stock mechanism at all. Some features that the stock mechanism supports are not available here, so it may not fit your needs as well. On the upside, it's pretty simple to understand how it works.

On boot, the systemd unit executes virtualbox_auto_start.py, which reads your configuration files and uses VBoxManage to start machines in headless mode. On shutdown, the unit executes virtualbox_auto_stop.py, which stops those machines.

Building the installer

You can build a .deb package for the service by running

$ ./make-package.sh

from the directory where the repository was cloned. Your mileage may vary with that script, but if it works it will create a file named build/virtualbox-auto_${VERSION}_all.deb.