govc

govc is a vSphere CLI built on top of govmomi.

Installation

You can find prebuilt govc binaries on the releases page.

Download and install a binary locally like this:

curl -L $URL_TO_BINARY | gunzip > /usr/local/bin/govc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/govc

Source

You can install the latest govc version from source if you have the Go toolchain installed.

go get -u github.com/vmware/govmomi/govc

(make sure $GOPATH/bin is in your PATH)

Usage

For the complete list of commands and flags, refer to the USAGE document.

Common flags include:

-u: ESXi or vCenter URL (ex: user:pass@host)
-debug: Trace requests and responses (to ~/.govmomi/debug)

Managed entities can be referred to by their absolute path or by their relative path. For example, when specifying a datastore to use for a subcommand, you can either specify it as /mydatacenter/datastore/mydatastore, or as mydatastore. If you're not sure about the name of the datastore, or even the full path to the datastore, you can specify a pattern to match. Both /*center/*/my* (absolute) and my*store (relative) will resolve to the same datastore, given there are no other datastores that match those globs.

The relative path in this example can only be used if the command can umambigously resolve a datacenter to use as origin for the query. If no datacenter is specified, govc defaults to the only datacenter, if there is only one. The datacenter itself can be specified as a pattern as well, enabling the following arguments: -dc='my*' -ds='*store'. The datastore pattern is looked up and matched relative to the datacenter which itself is specified as a pattern.

Besides specifying managed entities as arguments, they can also be specified using environment variables. The following environment variables are used by govc to set defaults:

GOVC_URL: URL of ESXi or vCenter instance to connect to.

The URL scheme defaults to https and the URL path defaults to /sdk. This means that specifying user:pass@host is equivalent to https://user:pass@host/sdk.

If password include special characters like # or : you can use GOVC_USERNAME and GOVC_PASSWORD to have a simple GOVC_URL

When using govc against VMware Workstation, GOVC_URL can be set to "localhost" without a user or pass, in which case local ticket based authentication is used.
GOVC_USERNAME: USERNAME to use if not specified in GOVC_URL.
GOVC_PASSWORD: PASSWORD to use if not specified in GOVC_URL.
GOVC_TLS_CA_CERTS: Override system root certificate authorities.

export GOVC_TLS_CA_CERTS=~/.govc_ca.crt Use path separator to specify multiple files: export GOVC_TLS_CA_CERTS=~/ca-certificates/bar.crt:~/ca-certificates/foo.crt
GOVC_TLS_KNOWN_HOSTS: File(s) for thumbprint based certificate verification.

Thumbprint based verification can be used in addition to or as an alternative to GOVC_TLS_CA_CERTS for self-signed certificates. Example: export GOVC_TLS_KNOWN_HOSTS=~/.govc_known_hosts govc about.cert -u host -k -thumbprint | tee -a $GOVC_TLS_KNOWN_HOSTS govc about -u user:pass@host
GOVC_INSECURE: Disable certificate verification.

This option sets Go's tls.Config.InsecureSkipVerify flag and is false by default. Quoting https://golang.org/pkg/crypto/tls/#Config:

InsecureSkipVerify controls whether a client verifies the server's certificate chain and host name. If InsecureSkipVerify is true, TLS accepts any certificate presented by the server and any host name in that certificate. In this mode, TLS is susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. This should be used only for testing.
GOVC_DATACENTER
GOVC_DATASTORE
GOVC_NETWORK
GOVC_RESOURCE_POOL
GOVC_HOST
GOVC_GUEST_LOGIN: Guest credentials for guest operations
GOVC_VIM_NAMESPACE: Vim namespace defaults to urn:vim25
GOVC_VIM_VERSION: Vim version defaults to 6.0

Platform specific notes

MSYS2 (Windows)

Inventory path arguments with a leading '/' are subject to Posix path conversion.

Examples

Several examples are embedded in the govc command help

Status

Changes to the cli are subject to semantic versioning.

Refer to the CHANGELOG for version to version changes.

When new govc commands or flags are added, the PATCH version will be incremented. This enables you to require a minimum version from within a script, for example:

govc version -require 0.14

Projects using govc

License

govc is available under the Apache 2 license.

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