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Hello,
We have a need for a non-network based (i.e. hypercall / out-of-band) file
browser for containers and VMs within the pve-manager web UI. I'd like to be
able to select a VM or container, click "More", and choose "File manager" and
then browse the VM or container's file systems and upload or download files
from my local system, through the web-browser.
For VMs (qemu), the qemu-guest-agent provides the ability to read/write guest
files, and the pve API exposes it (with strict file size limits) as
nodes->{node}->qemu->{vmid}->agent->file-*. Presumably, a web UI file manager
would use that API endpoint, plus maybe an enhancement for directory listing
and chunked upload/download (to support arbitrary size files).
For containers (LXC), the pct application can read/write files by (I think)
mounting the container root file system on the host and touching it directly.
But there's no corresponding API endpoint. If there were, it could be used by a
future web UI file manager.
So to implement this feature, I think there are 5 steps:
1. Enhance the qemu-guest-agent and qm to support reading directory
structure and creating directories.
2. Enhance the pve API to expose these new features like file-read and
file-write.
3. Enhance the pve API to support chunked file read and write, for large
files. Maybe also requiring an enhancement to the qemu-guest-agent?
4. Enhance the pve API to support chunked file read/write, whole file
read/write, and directory structure/creating directories (through direct
filesystem interaction on the host).
5. Write a JS front-end file manager, invokable from the Other menu, which
uses these new/enhanced API endpoints to implement a general purpose
out-of-band file manager.
Is there interest from the proxmox developers for something like this? If we
started working on some of these items, would there be interest in accepting
patches? Does my general approach look sound?
(We also investigated using SPICE's folder-sharing capabilities and the
spice-proxy provided by the host, but that doesn't work with the Windows
virt-viewer client, only the Linux client. It looks like there was some
interest in the past in enhancing xterm.js to support xmodem file transfer, but
it didn't go far.)
Regards,
Nathan Blythe
CACI
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