Re: [libvirt] API calls to get interfaces and block devices

On 04/11/2014 07:14 AM, Ruben Kerkhof wrote: > Hi all, > > I have a few python scripts which use the libvirt api to get interface and block device statistics. > What has been bugging me for a while now that is that there’s no high level api to get a list of all interfaces or block devices for a vm. > The list can be retrieved from the xml with a bit of Xpath magic, but this seems to me to break the nice abstraction layer libvirt provides. > Ideally, I don’t have to do anything with xml, and add dependencies on xml parsers to my code. > > I’ve seen examples of code doing this, for example the collectd libvirt plugin, but there must be many others. > > Can I kindly ask for such an API? Unfortunately I don’t have the skills to code this up myself. > It's an unavoidable fact that XML is part of the libvirt API. Going down the route of providing APIs that return bits and pieces of the XML is a slippery slope and increases libvirt maintenance burden. python has a native XML library. To do what you want is pretty straight forward once you understand the concepts. For example this prints every interface mac address for the VM 'f20': import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET import libvirt conn = libvirt.open("qemu:///system") dom = conn.lookupByName("f20") xml = dom.XMLDesc(0) root = ET.fromstring(xml) ifaces = root.findall("./devices/interface/mac") for iface in ifaces: print iface.attrib["address"]