ovaify

What is it?

A Go library for creating OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) files.

Use cases

This library was developed to simplify the virtual machine deployment supply chain. It enables the creation of OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) files from an existing OVF (Open Virtualization Format) file and its associated artifacts (such as a virtual machine disk image).

An OVF only provides the configuration for a virtual machine appliance - it does not provide the appliance's disk, or other files. A OVA on the other hand provides all of these in the form of a single compressed file. Using OVAs makes deploying new appliances easier, and more maintainable.

While open source tools like packer and VirtualBox can create these files, they cannot easily create OVA files from existing OVFs. This is usually worked around using VMWare's ovftool. Because ovftool is closed source, incorporating it into a VM development toolchain can be a logistical headache. This library allows developers to incorporate ovftool's functionality into their toolchain without such headaches.

API

The library's API is very small. The most notable function is the CreateOvaFile function. This function creats an OVA using the provided OvaConfig. Here is an example application that uses this function:

package main

import (
    "log"

    "github.com/stephen-fox/ovaify"
)

func main() {
    config := ovaify.OvaConfig{
        OutputFilePath:     "/my-awesome.ova",
        OvfFilePath:        "/my-vm.ovf",
        FilePathsToInclude: []string{
            "/my-vm-disk-image.vmdk",
        },
    }

    err := ovaify.CreateOvaFile(config)
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal("Failed to create OVA - " + err.Error())
    }
}