README

qq2clone is a linux tool to simplify creating and managing copy-on-write clones of template QEMU/KVM virtual machines. It can perform batch operations in case you are working with multiple clones. For much more information, there is a markdown version of the manual page you can read above (man.md).

qq2clone has these dependences:

• virsh (qq2clone has started the transition to use the libvirt API directly, this will not remain a dependency forever)
• Bash 4.0+
• sqlite3
• xmllint (from libxml2)
• qemu-img
• libvirt tools:
  • virt-clone
  • virt-xml
  • virt-xml-validate

INSTALL

The file qq2clone_installer.bash is a setup script containing a self-extracting archive. If you copy and paste the following into a terminal, it will download and run.

curl  https://git.j-g-web.com/jesse/qq2clone/raw/branch/master/qq2clone_installer.bash > .qq2clone_installer.bash 2> /dev/null &&
chmod +x .qq2clone_installer.bash &&
./.qq2clone_installer.bash

FAQ

Is this really 3000 lines of Bash? In 2021?!

Yep! I am aware that more popular, modern scripting languages like Python exist, but Bash is more than sufficiently capable for a project of this nature. The reason I chose it specifically was as an opportunity to further develop my Bash skills. Similarly, the lv_api_do helper application is written in C rather than Python (for which libvirt API bindings exist) because I hadn't written any C in a long time and it was an opportunity to re-familiarize myself with the language.

EXAMPLES

TODO: I will flesh out this section later, for now check out the examples section in man.md