VIRT-MANAGER(1)

✨ VIRT-MANAGER(1) ✨

okay bestie, pull up a chair 🫶 this is the manual page for virt-manager, from the Virtualization Support corner of your friendly neighborhood manual set. It's giving "graphical tool for managing libvirt VMs" energy, and honestly? She ate. 💅

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🌸 NAME 🌸

virt-manager — the graphical tool for managing libvirt VMs, periodt. 🎀

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

virt-manager [OPTIONS]

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✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

So like, virt-manager is a desktop tool for managing virtual machines. Not me being a whole entire GUI for your hypervisor 😭 — she can:

• control the lifecycle of machines you already have (that's bootup/shutdown, pause/resume, suspend/restore, no cap)
• provision brand new virtual machines and various types of store
• manage virtual networks
• access the graphical console of your VMs
• view performance statistics

…and the way she does literally all of that locally or remotely?? Main character behavior, fr fr. 👑

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

Standard GTK options like --g-fatal-warnings are accepted, iykyk. 💅

And here's what you can pass when you're running virt-manager:

• -h, --help — shows you the command line help summary. the lil "what do I even type" moment 🌸
• --version — prints virt-manager's version number and dips out (exit, that is) ✨
• -c, --connect — specify the hypervisor connection URI
• --debug — lists debugging output to the console (normally this stuff only gets logged in ~/.cache/virt-manager/virt-manager.log). heads up bestie: this one implies --no-fork 🫶
• --no-fork — don't fork virt-manager off into the background. go read the VIRT-MANAGER, SSH, AND FORKING section for the tea 🍓
• --fork — force forking virt-manager off into the background. this is the default behavior. again, see VIRT-MANAGER, SSH, AND FORKING for the full story 💀

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🎀 DIALOG WINDOW OPTIONS 🎀

okay so these are special. for these options, only the requested window will be shown — the manager window will not be run in this case. connection autostart will also be disabled. and every single one of these requires you to specify a manual --connect URI. no shortcuts, bestie. 😤

• --show-domain-creator — display the wizard for creating new virtual machines 🧚
• --show-domain-editor NAME|ID|UUID — display the dialog for editing properties of the virtual machine with unique ID matching either the domain name, ID, or UUID
• --show-domain-performance NAME|ID|UUID — display the dialog for monitoring performance of the virtual machine with unique ID matching either the domain name, ID, or UUID 📈
• --show-domain-console NAME|ID|UUID — display the virtual console of the virtual machine with unique ID matching either the domain name, ID, or UUID
• --show-host-summary — display the host/connection details window.

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🌈 SYSTEM TRAY OPTION 🌈

this one's different from the dialog squad: connection autostart will not be disabled, and so it doesn't require specifying a manual --connect URI. but she supports a --connect URI as well, so do you 💅

• --show-systray — launch virt-manager only in the system tray

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💜 VIRT-MANAGER, SSH, AND FORKING 💜

storytime, bestie, because this one is a whole saga. 🍿

Historically, on startup virt-manager would detach from the running terminal and fork into the background. why? because that forced any usage of ssh to call ssh-askpass when it needed a password, rather than silently asking on a terminal the user probably isn't even watching. iconic avoidance of awkwardness, honestly. 🙈

then openssh 8.4p1, released in Sep 2020, added the SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE environment variable, which saves us from having to do the fork dance. 🕺

<https://man.openbsd.org/ssh.1#SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE>

virt-manager now sets SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE=force. however — and this is the important part, don't skip it — to get this to work with libvirt ssh connections, you'll need libvirt 10.8.0, released in October 1st 2024.

virt-manager no longer forks by defaults.

You can get the old forking behavior back with the --fork option, or by setting the VIRT_MANAGER_DEFAULT_FORK=yes environment variable. ✨

But if you find you need forking for a usecase other than temporarily working around libvirt version issues, please let the virt-manager developers know by filing a bug report. they wanna hear from you fr fr 🫶

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😭 BUGS 😭

Please see <https://virt-manager.org/bugs/> — go tell them everything, they're listening 💌

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright (C) Red Hat, Inc, and various contributors. This is free software. You may redistribute copies of it under the terms of the GNU General Public License <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. ⚠️ (yes bestie, that part is in all caps in the original and it stays in all caps here — respect the drama 💀)

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🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

• virsh(1)
• virt-viewer(1)
• the project website <https://virt-manager.org> ⭐

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🎀 this was VIRT-MANAGER(1) from the Virtualization Support manual set — the footer said so too, it just said it in boring font. go forth and manage those VMs, you absolute icon. 💖✨🫶