This gem is no longer under active development. Please do not use it.

I've decided to stop developing this library since the main user of the library and the purpose it was created (Vagrant) no longer makes use of it. The reasoning behind this is because the win32ole support on Windows is simply painful and doesn't support all the features necessary to fully support the VirtualBox API.

If you're interested in maintaining this gem, please contact me (mitchellh).

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.

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 uses the native COM interface with VirtualBox provides to communicate with VirtualBox. On Windows, this is globally available. On Linux-based machines, the gem uses Ruby-FFI to talk to a dynamic library. No configuration should be necessary.

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_size}"

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

# Save it!
vm.save

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.

Please use the issue tracker.

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 --relock
rake

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

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

• Kieran Pilkington
• Aleksey Palazhchenko