A little bit of background for this post.

I love VirtualBox. Though, to be more specific, I love having a virtual machine to use for testing. Discovering bridged ip addresses was a revelation for me.

But I also love ssh. I regularly ssh from my laptop in my living room to my desktop in my office because I’m too lazy to get up. So, I want to be able to set up virtual machines via ssh.

Docker is pretty neat, but it’s not really designed for what I want it to do. I tried it, and decided it wasn’t really worth fidgeting with it to set up a bridged IP address, which I’m not 100% sure is possible in a Docker container anyway. I used Vagrant from Hashicorp for awhile, which is pretty good, but I’ve encountered a versioning problem– My version of VirtualBox was too new for my version of Vagrant, so it wouldn’t start. So, why not cut out the middleman and just manage VirtualBox via CLI? The only feature from Vagrant I really care about is starting a VM, anyway.

I thought it would be difficult, but it’s actually surpisingly easy. To do this, you’ll need install VirtualBox extensions from their website. Make sure to get the extentions for the right version of Virtualbox– If you’re installing VBox from a repo, it’s probably in the “VirtualBox older builds” page. Also, I’m not bothering with actually creating virtual machines via CLI from scratch, but instead making a base VM to copy when needed. Creating from scratch, I don’t think, can be done via CLI, though I could be wrong about that. So, I created a base VM while physically at the host machine, and can now clone that machine, and can now create a new test server via CLI.

And these are the commands that I use to manage them, in no particular order. “Ubuntu Server” is just an example name, matching whatever the name is that you’ll see when you open the VirtualBox Manager.

IP addresses:
It doesn’t seem to be possible to get a VM’s ip address using VBoxManage if they’re a bridged adapter. (The listed solutions online don’t work.) The best I can find is “nmap -sP 192.168.1.*”, which will list all IP addresses on the network. If it’s run both before and after the VM is started, the IP should be found.

List all VMs:
VBoxManage list vms

List all running VMs:
VBoxManage list runningvms

Start VM:
VBoxManage startvm "Ubuntu Server" --type headless

Pause VM:
VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" pause --type headless

Restart paused VM:
VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" resume --type headless

Shut down VM:
VBoxManage controlvm "Ubuntu Server" poweroff --type headless

Change network adaptor to bridged:
VBoxManage modifyvm "Ubuntu Server" --nic1 bridged

Clone vm:
VBoxManage clonevm "Ubuntu Server" --name "New Ubuntu Server" --register

• If forget the “register” option, the “registervm” command is supposed to fix that, but I can’t get it to work. In that case, best to start over and delete the newly-created folder in ~/VirtualBox\ VMs
• If forget the “name” option, it will just have the old name plus “clone”.

Delete vm:
VBoxManage unregistervm "Ubuntu Server" --delete