log applicable 'virt-install' command

[martinpitt]

Discussed in cockpit-project/cockpit#20793

^{Originally posted by paul-hammant July 20, 2024}
Page: Create VM

Cockpit would be even better if each UI-creation of a VM logged the equivalent virt-install command used. This would serve as education for users, such that they could transition to scripted creation of VMs. There logs are created for "New machine qemu-NUMBER-NAME" but none of the command used. I realize that cockpit does not shell out to virt-install specifically, but the equivalent command with arg would be great.

Same would be true for podman containers :)

[martinpitt]

@paul-hammant : Cockpit-machines actually does call out to virt-install: https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines/blob/main/src/scripts/install_machine.py.

With window.debugging = "machines" you can get the install_machine.py command line, but not directly the virt-install command line. That also wouldn't be quite sufficient, as there is some extra XML preparation that needs to be done. But let's leave this open as an enhancement proposal.

[paul-hammant]

Thanks. I type window.debugging = "machines" into Inspector->Console for the page that has the "Create new virtual machine" overlay up in it? Or that's something I do in qemu.conf that the Python script you link to uses?

[martinpitt]

@paul-hammant (Sorry, missed your reply); yes, that goes into the browser inspector. But as I said, this isn't quite sufficient, as it doesn't show the virt-install invocation. This is a hard problem, as there just is no single virt-install command which would reproduce the VM -- it needs the additional XML preparation/modification logic.

[paul-hammant]

No worries about having more valuable things to do, sir.

I think Proxmox is in the same place - some of the more advanced network stuff has to be done in other config files however simple pct-create is at the outset.

Circling back to KVM ecosystem, I played with Zig and AI for making some of the config in an article - https://paulhammant.com/2024/04/12/playing-with-zig - and of course that is too buggy to use real work and ended up being more about Zig.