VBoxManage

Reference

See Chapter 8 in the VirtualBox Manual.

Cheat Sheet

This is just a short list of some possible commands. All of these commands have many more options or variants, so refer to the documentation or command help.

To get a list of all the available commands, enter VBoxManage in your console.

VBoxManage -v

print version number

VBoxManage list --long vms

List available machines

Without the --long option, this will show you just the name and UUID of the machine.

E.g. "vagrant_default_1418918147177_40503" {874b812c-f37d-4f98-84a8-06460d3104f8}

The name (or UUID) is used in most commands to specify which VM you are interacting with.

VBoxManage showvminfo vmname --details

Show the details of your machine

Upon first look, this command seems to be the same as list --long, but there is a bit more information in showvminfo

For comparison, try meld <$(VBoxManage list --long vms) <$(VBoxManage showvminfo vagrant_default_1418918147177_40503 --details)

VBoxManage modifyvm vmname --memory 2048

Give the vm 2 GB of RAM (Note that this will not persist if your VM is defined by Vagrant. To persist changes in Vagrant, you would modify the Vagrantfile-extra.rb file)

VBoxManage import <ovfname/ovaname> --dry-run

import an appliance that you exported somewhere else