The Python binding should be complete and are mostly automatically generated from the formal description of the API in xml. The bindings are articulated around 2 classes virConnect and virDomain mapping to the C types. Functions in the C API taking either type as argument then becomes methods for the classes, their name is just stripped from the virConnect or virDomain(Get) prefix and the first letter gets converted to lower case, for example the C functions:
int virConnectNumOfDomains (virConnectPtr conn);
int virDomainSetMaxMemory (virDomainPtr domain, unsigned long memory);
become
virConnect::numOfDomains(self)
virDomain::setMaxMemory(self, memory)
This process is fully automated, you can get a summary of the conversion in the file libvirtclass.txt present in the python dir or in the docs.There is a couple of function who don't map directly to their C counterparts due to specificities in their argument conversions:
virConnectListDomains is replaced by virDomain::listDomainsID(self) which returns a list of the integer ID for the currently running domains
virDomainGetInfo is replaced by virDomain::info() which returns a list of
state: one of the state values (virDomainState)
maxMemory: the maximum memory used by the domain
memory: the current amount of memory used by the domain
nbVirtCPU: the number of virtual CPU
cpuTime: the time used by the domain in nanoseconds
So let's look at a simple example:
import libvirt import sys try: conn = libvirt.openReadOnly(None) except libvirt.libvirtError: print('Failed to open connection to the hypervisor') sys.exit(1) try: dom0 = conn.lookupByName("Domain-0") except libvirt.libvirtError: print('Failed to find the main domain') sys.exit(1) print("Domain 0: id %d running %s" % (dom0.ID(), dom0.OSType())) print(dom0.info())
There is not much to comment about it, it really is a straight mapping from the C API, the only points to notice are:
the import of the module called libvirt
getting a connection to the hypervisor, in that case using the openReadOnly function allows the code to execute as a normal user.
getting an object representing the Domain 0 using lookupByName
if the domain is not found a libvirtError exception will be raised
extracting and printing some information about the domain using various methods associated to the virDomain class.