`qemush` - An Unix philosophy respecting QEMU wrapper written in shell

How does it work

qemush allows to run commands as Unix user qemu to manage virtual machines and their disks associated.

Why

qemush is daemonless : no bloaty long running process is needed for qemush to work.

qemush is lightweight : it only consists in a shell script to automate repeated tasks and force good practices.

qemush needs few dependencies : see section Dependencies for details.

qemush is hackable : you can write your own launching scripts to make it work as intended.

qemush is easy to setup : you can make it work in a few steps, see section Installation instructions.

Dependencies

qemu - this is literally a QEMU wrapper so there's a chance you'll need it
bash - the qemush interpreter
coreutils - used for basic OS operations
sudo - execute commands as qemu
screen - for process supervision
source-highlight - for syntax highlighting when displaying launching scripts
any text editor - used for builting function to edit launching scripts

Installation instructions

QEMU user and group

qemush acts as Unix user qemu to manage virtual machines. You need to create a system user qemu that cannot login, with any home directory, in an Unix group of the same name. Example :

# Example if the qemu user doesn't exist
# Make sure /etc/shells contains /bin/nologin
useradd -r -s /bin/nologin qemu

For ease of use, you need to grant every user in the qemu group via sudo the right to execute commands as qemu. You can find an example sudoers rule in this repo's etc/sudoers.d folder.

Add `qemush` in the `PATH`

Use your preferred way to add the qemush script to a folder of PATH. Recommended : copy the script in /usr/local/bin to make it effortlessly system wide.

Usage

Writing a launching script

The default text editor used by qemush is nvim, but it can be overriden by the EDITOR environment variable.

Run the following command to start editing a launching script by the name of your choice :

qemush edit "$name"

Example scripts are available in this repo's qemu/bin folder.

Launching a virtual machine

Virtual machines are identified by the name of their launching scripts. You can launch any machine with the following command :

qemush start "$name"

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qemush - An Unix philosophy respecting QEMU wrapper written in shell